Leonardo had abandoned once and for all that fateful house in which he had experienced such unhappiness. In fact, he was never again seen in that neighborhood, with the result that the compadre did not lay eyes upon him again for a very long time.
The boy, while he was new in his godfather’s house, comported himself with the utmost circumspection and gravity. As soon as he started feeling at home, however, the gloves came back off. He nonetheless gained his godfather’s great affection, which grew day in and day out until it reached a state of emotion-filled, blind devotion. Even the boy’s misdeeds, which more often than not were quite vicious, the good man usually considered funny. To his mind, no other boy in the entire neighborhood could compare with his godson, and he never tired of talking about everything the youngster said and did. Sometimes what went on was obviously the behavior of a spoiled child, but he found it the manifestation of liveliness and spirit. Other times it involved language that bespoke a highly developed reprobacy in someone so young, but he judged it the most ingenuous language in the world.
This was natural in a man who had lived a life such as he had lived: He was fifty years old and had never had an emotional relationship; he had always got along by himself, alone; he was a genuine practitioner of the most resolute celibacy. As a result, with the first emotional attachment he had ever formed, his heart expanded fully, and his love for the boy grew to the proportions of complete blindness, while the latter, availing himself of the immunity provided him by this state of affairs, simply did anything that came into his head.
Sometimes, while sitting in the barber shop, he would amuse himself by making faces at the customers as they were getting their shave. Some of them reacted angrily, others laughed despite themselves. A consequence of either was that they usually left the shop with their faces nicked up—to the boy’s great amusement and the barber’s discredit. Other times he would secret his godfather’s sharpest razor away in some corner or other, so that the customer would have to sit there for a long while with his face lathered up, biting his lip with impatience, as the barber searched the place over. All the while he would be laughing nastily to himself. Nothing that came into the house stayed in one piece for long; and he kept everything in a dither. In the backyards he would throw stones at the neighbors’ roofs; from the street door he would pick a quarrel with every passerby and anyone who came to a window, with the result that no one around had a good word to say about him. The godfather, however, took no heed and continued to lavish affection upon him. In fact, he devoted a great deal of effort to planning for his future. He sometimes spent his nights building castles in the air: He dreamed of great fortune and elevated position for his godson and tried to plan ways leading to such ends. Here, more or less, is the thread of his thinking: “It is true (he reasoned) that in the office that his father practices you can earn good money, if you’re good at the job. But there will always be someone who’ll say ‘Oh, he’s just a bailiff.’ No, that won’t do. Now in my own trade it’s true that I’ve done pretty well (there is a whole story in that ‘I’ve done pretty well’ that will have to be told), but I don’t want him to end up a slave to customers’ small change. Maybe it would be good to send him to school, but where would school get him? It’s true that he does seem to have a good memory, and after a few years I could send him on to Coimbra. Yes, I could do that, since I’ve saved up all that small change. And I’m old; I have no children or other relatives. But what the devil will he take up at Coimbra? Lawyer? No … that’s a bad profession. Solicitor? That would be good. Yes, a solicitor. But… no, no; I hate people who bother me with papers and lawsuits. Clergyman? A gentleman cleric would be nice … very dignified; you make a lot of money; you could get to be a parish priest. So it’s decided; he’s going to be a clergyman, that’s what. I’ll have the pleasure of seeing him say Mass, of seeing him preach in the Sé. I’ll show all these lowlifes here in the neighborhood who don’t like him now how right I have been in loving him. He’s still pretty young, but I’m going to start trying to get him straightened out right here at home, and when he gets to be twelve or fourteen he’ll start school.”
Having ruminated this idea over for a considerable period of time, one day he called the boy to him and said, “Young man, look here; you’re getting bigger all the time (he was then nine years of age). You will have to learn a calling so you can be somebody someday. From next Monday on (it was then Wednesday) I’m going to start teaching you your ABC’s. Get your fill of rascality the rest of this week.”
The youngster listened to this speech with a mixture of astonishment and disgust, and asked in return, “You mean I’m not going to be able to play in the backyard anymore, or in the doorway?”
“Only on Sundays after we get back from Mass—”
“But I don’t even care for Mass.”
The godfather did not like that answer; it did not augur well in one destined for the priesthood. But it wasn’t enough to make him lose hope.
The child took to heart the words “Get your fill of rascality the rest of this week,” seeing them as an open license to do anything, be it good or bad, that might come into his head in the free time he had remaining. He spent the days in a frightening licentiousness. Two or three times the godfather found him astride the wall that separated their backyard from the neighbor’s, at great risk of falling.
That evening as he was seated in the barbershop door, he saw down at the end of the street a procession illuminated by the light of lanterns and candles and heard the voices of priests praying. He quivered with delight and leaped to his feet. It was the Procession of the Bom-Jesus.
Up until not too long ago some city streets still had black crosses nailed up at intervals along their walls. On Wednesdays, and some other days of the week as well, there would set out from the Church of the Bom-Jesus and other churches a kind of procession made up of priests carrying crosses, members of some of the brotherhoods with lanterns, and people in great numbers. The priests would pray aloud, and the people would intone the prayer along with them. At each of the affixed crosses the procession would stop, everyone would kneel, and they would pray for an extended period. This act, which satisfied the sensibilities of the pious, provided means and occasion for every kind of mockery and immorality that the youth of the time could dream up—they who are the elders of our time and constantly complain about the irreverence of the youth of today. They would walk along in a jeering mass behind the procession and interrupt the chanting with proclamations of their own, some merely amusing, others outright indecent. They carried with them lengths of string with heavy balls of wax fastened to one end. If some unfortunate man whose head the passing years had deprived of hair should come close enough, they would work their way into range and, hiding behind their fellows, throw the projectile so that it hit full upon that devotee’s bald pate. Then they would quickly wind in the string, and no one would be able to tell where the attack had come from. These and other scenes further excited mockery and hilarity from the crowd.
This is what, in those times of devotion, was referred to as “running the Via-Sacra.”
Now as we said, the boy fairly quivered with pleasure as he saw the procession approach. He surreptitiously dropped down to threshold level and then, without the barber seeing, flattened himself against the wall between the shop’s two doors, getting up on his tiptoes so he could see as much as possible.
The procession got closer and closer, and the youngster palpitated with pleasure. It reached their very door. Then a thought occurred to him that made him absolutely shiver; he remembered the godfather’s words: “Get your fill of rascality.…” He peeked inside the shop, saw his godfather busy, leaped out from where he had stationed himself, mixed in with the crowd, and chimed right in with his own jeers and shouts, adding to the level of the hubbub. It was a feverish pleasure he felt. He lost track of everything; he leaped about, he jumped, he shouted, he prayed, he sang. The only things he failed to do were those that were beyond his ability to accomplish. He got in league with two other boys his size who were also in the crowd. And when he finally realized where he was, he was all the way back at the Church of the Bom-Jesus with the Via-Sacra procession.