I raised my eyes to the heavens, which were getting overcast, but it was not to see whether they were cloudy or clear. It was to another heaven that I lifted up my soul: to my refuge, my friend. Then I said to myself:
“I promise to say a thousand paternosters and a thousand ave marias, if José Dias sees to it that I don’t have to go to the seminary.”
It was an enormous quantity. The reason was that I was loaded down with unfulfilled promises. The last one had been two hundred paternosters and two hundred ave marias, if it didn’t rain one afternoon on an outing to Santa Teresa. It didn’t rain, but I didn’t say the prayers. Ever since I was small I had become used to asking favors of heaven, promising prayers if they were granted. I said the first ones, the next were put off, and as they piled up they were gradually forgotten. In this way I got to twenty, thirty, fifty. I got into the hundreds, and now it was a thousand. It was a way of bribing the divine will by the number of prayers; furthermore, each new promise was made and sworn on the basis that the outstanding debt would be paid. But what can you do, when your soul has been marked by sloth from the cradle, and life has done nothing to change this? Heaven would do me the favor, and I would put off the payment. In the end, I got lost in the accounts.
“A thousand, a thousand,” I repeated to myself.
In truth, the favor that I was asking was now immense, nothing less than the salvation or wreck of my whole existence. A thousand, a thousand, a thousand. I needed a sum that would pay off all the arrears. If He were irritated at my forgetfulness, God might very well refuse to hear me without a great deal of money … Serious reader, it’s possible these childish worries bore you, that is if you don’t think them ridiculous. Sublime they certainly were not. I thought for a long time how to redeem the spiritual debt. I could find no other currency in which, at least in intention, everything could be paid off, and the books of my moral conscience closed without a deficit. To have a hundred masses said, or climb the steps to Glória Church* on my knees to hear another, to go to the Holy Land, everything that the old slave women told me about famous promises—all these things came to mind, but they did not carry conviction. It was hard to climb a hill on one’s knees: I was bound to bruise them. The Holy Land was a long way off. It was a lot of masses, and I might find my soul was in pawn again …