That was how it all happened. My mother hesitated a little, but ended up giving way, after Father Cabral, having consulted the bishop, came back to tell her that yes, it could be done. I left the seminary at the end of the year.
I was then a little over seventeen … This should have been the middle of the book, but my inexperience has let my pen run away with me, and I have come almost to the end of the paper, with the best of the story still to tell. There’s no way for it now but to take it in great strides, chapter after chapter, with few corrections, not much reflection, everything in resumé. This chapter already covers months, others will cover years, and so we will get to the end. One of the sacrifices I make to this harsh necessity is the analysis of my emotions at age seventeen. I don’t know if you were ever seventeen. If you were, you must know that it is an age when the half-man and the half-boy make a curious whole. I was most curious, as my dependent José Dias would say, and quite right too. What that superlative quality did for me I could never say here, without falling into the error that I have just condemned; the analysis of my emotions at that time did in fact enter into my plans. Even though I was the son of the seminary and of my mother, I already felt, beneath my chaste modesty, some impulses of a more daring, bolder nature; they came from my blood, but also from the girls who in the street or from windows wouldn’t leave me alone. They thought I was handsome, and said so; some wanted to see my beauty closer up, and vanity is the beginning of corruption.