The rest will take up many chapters still; there are lives that need less, and still are finished and complete.
At the age of five or six, Ezequiel gave no signs of disappointing my dreams on Glória beach; on the contrary, you could imagine every possible vocation in him, from idler to apostle. Idler can be understood in a good sense, that of a man who thinks and keeps himself to himself; he sometimes shut up within himself, and reminded one of his mother, ever since she was a girl. So, too, he would become excited and insisted on going to persuade the neighborhood girls that the sweets I brought him were real; he didn’t do it before he had eaten his fill, but neither do the apostles carry the good news until their hearts are full of it. Escobar, the good businessman, gave it as his opinion that the principal cause of this latter tendency was perhaps to suggest implicitly to his neighbors that they might undertake a similar mission when their parents brought them sweets; he laughed at his own joke, and announced that he would take him into partnership.
He liked music no less than sweets, and I asked Capitu to play on the piano the refrain of the black man selling coconut sweets in Matacavalos…
“I can’t remember it.”
“Don’t say that; don’t you remember that black man selling sweets, in the afternoons …”
“I remember a black man selling sweets, but not the tune.”
“Nor the words?”
“Nor the words.”
My lady reader, who must still remember the words if she has read me attentively, will be amazed at such forgetfulness, the more so as she will still remember the cries of her childhood and adolescence; she will have forgotten some, but not everything stays in our minds. That’s what Capitu said, and I could find nothing to say in reply. However, I did something she did not expect: I ran to my old papers. In São Paulo, when I was a student, I asked a music teacher to transcribe the tune of the refrain; he did it with pleasure (all I had to do was repeat it to him from memory) and I kept the piece of paper; I went to look for it. A little later I interrupted a ballad she was playing, with the scrap of paper in my hand. I explained it to her; she ran over the sixteen notes.
Capitu found a peculiar, almost delicious flavor in the tune; she told her son the story of the refrain, and so played it and sang it. Ezequiel took advantage of the music to ask me to give the lie to the words by giving him some money.
He played at being doctor, soldier, actor, dancer. I never gave him oratories; but wooden horses and a sword hanging at his side were his passion. I’ll say nothing of the battalions passing in the street, and which he ran to see; all children do that. What not all of them have are the eyes that he had. In none have I ever seen the eager pleasure with which he watched the passing soldiers and listened to the drum-beats as they marched.
“Look, Papa! look!”
“I’m looking, my boy!”
“Look at the commander! Look at his horse! Look at the soldiers!”
One day he started blowing into his hands as if they were a bugle; I gave him a toy trumpet. I bought him little lead soldiers, and pictures of battles which he looked at over and over, asking me to explain a piece of artillery, a fallen soldier, another with his sword raised—all his admiration was for the one with his sword raised. One day (what an innocent age!) he asked me impatiently:
“But, Papa, why doesn’t he bring his sword down once and for all?”
“Because he’s painted, my son.”
“Why did he paint himself then?”
I laughed at the mistake, and explained to him that the soldier in the picture had not painted himself, but the engraver, and I had to explain what an engraver was, and an engraving: Capitu’s curiosity, in a word.
These were his principal childhood traits: one more and I’ll finish the chapter. One day, at Escobar’s house, he saw a cat with a mouse between its teeth. The cat would not release its prey, nor could it find anywhere to get away from us. Ezequiel said nothing, stopped, squatted down, and looked. When we saw him so attentive, we asked him from far off what it was; he signalled to us to keep quiet. Escobar said:
“I’ll bet it’s the cat that’s caught a mouse. It’s the devil, the way the mice still infest the house. Let’s go and see.”
Capitu wanted to see her son as well; I went with them. It was true, it was a cat and a mouse, a very banal situation, with nothing interesting or amusing about it. The only peculiar thing about it was the fact that the mouse was alive, struggling, and my little lad was enraptured. Anyway, it was soon over. As soon as it sensed other people, the cat started to run off; the boy, without taking his eyes off it, motioned to us again to be quiet; and the silence could not have been greater. I was going to say religious, crossed it out, but I’m putting it back now, not only to convey the completeness of the silence, but because there was in the action of the cat and the mouse something like a ritual. The only noise was the final squeaks of the mouse, and they were in any case very weak; its legs gave slight, uncoordinated movements. A little annoyed, I clapped my hands to make the cat run away, which it did. The others didn’t even have time to stop me; Ezequiel was dismayed.
Oh, Papa!”
“What’s the matter? By now the mouse has been eaten.”
“Yes, I know, but I wanted to see.”
The two of them laughed; even I thought it amusing.