By that time Escobar had left Andaraí and bought a house in Flamengo:* I saw it there, some days ago, when I had the urge to see if the old sensations were dead or just asleep; I can’t really tell, because in sleep, when it is heavy, the dead look like the living, except that the living still breathe. I was breathing a little heavily, but it might have been because of the sea, which was a little rough. Anyway, I passed on, lit a cigar, and found myself in Catete; I had come up by the Rua da Princesa, an old street… Old streets! Old houses! Old legs! We were all old, and needless to say in the bad sense: old and done for.
The house is old, but it hasn’t been altered at all. I don’t know if it still has the old number. I won’t reveal it, so that no one can go and dig out the story. Not that Escobar lives there still, or is even alive; he died a little later, as I will recount. While he was alive, since we were so close, we had, so to speak, only one house; I lived in his house, he in mine, and the stretch of beach between Glória and Flamengo was like a private right of way, for our use alone. It made me think of the two houses on Matacavalos, with the wall between them.
A historian in our language, I think it was João de Barros, puts into the mouth of a barbarian king some gentle words, when the Portuguese were proposing to establish a fort nearby; the king said that good friends should remain distant from one another, not close, so as not to become angry with one another, like the waves of the sea that were beating furiously on the rocky coastline they could see from there.† May the writer’s shade forgive me, if I doubt that the king said that, or that what he said is true. It was probably the writer himself who invented it to adorn his text, and he did right, for they are truly striking words. I do believe that the sea beat on the stones, as is its habit, since the days of Ulysses and before. But I am sure that the comparison is not a just one. Certainly there are enemies who live close by, but there are also friends who are both near and true. And the writer forgot—unless it had not yet been invented—forgot the adage: “out of sight, out of mind.” Our hearts could not have been closer than they now were. Our wives lived in each others’ houses, we passed our evenings here or there chatting, playing cards or gazing at the sea. The two little ones spent their days either at Flamengo or Glória.
As I observed that the same thing could happen to them as had happened between Capitu and me, they all agreed, and Sancha added that they were already beginning to look alike. I explained:
“No; it’s because Ezequiel imitates other people’s gestures.”
Escobar agreed with me, and suggested that sometimes children who play a lot together end up looking like each other. I nodded my head, as I often did in matters on which I had no opinion one way or the other. Anything was possible. The truth is that the two of them were very fond of each other, and might have ended up married; but they did not end up married.