Not only the eyes, but the other features, the face, the body, the whole person, were gradually rounded out with time. They were like a primitive sketch which the artist fills out and colors in little by little, and the figure starts to look out of the canvas, to smile, pulsate with life, almost to speak, until the family hangs the portrait on the wall, in memory of what once was and can no longer be. Here it could be and was. Habit could still fight against the effect of the change; but the change did take place, and not as happens in the theater; it happened like the day dawning: at first, it’s impossible to make out some handwriting: then you can read it in the street, at home, and then in your study, without opening the windows: the light filtering through the blinds is enough to make out the words. I read this letter, at first with difficulty and not entire, then I started to read more easily. True, I fled from it, put it in my pocket, ran home, shut myself in, didn’t open the windows: I even shut my eyes. When I opened them and the letter again, the writing was clear, and the message as clear as could be.
So Escobar began to arise from his tomb, from the seminary and from Flamengo to sit beside me at table, greet me on the stairs, kiss me in my study in the morning, or ask for my customary blessing at night. All these actions were repulsive; I put up with them or carried them out, so as not to reveal myself to myself and to the world. But what I could hide from the world, I could not hide from myself, since I lived closer to myself than anyone. When neither mother nor son were with me, my despair grew, and I swore to kill them both, either at a single blow, or slowly, to divide all the moments of my deluded and anguished life by the time it took them to die. When, however, I came back home, and saw at the top of the stairs the little creature who loved me and was waiting for me, I was disarmed, and put the punishment off from one day to another.
What happened between Capitu and me in those dark days will not be put down here, since it was so petty and repetitious, and it is now too late to describe it without falling short of the truth or wearying the reader. But the main thing can be said. And the main thing is that our storms were now continuous and terrible. Before the discovery of that evil land of truth, we had other tempests, of short duration; it was never long before the sky was blue, the sun shining and the sea smooth: we would set our sails to cross it once more, and they would take us to the loveliest isles and coasts in the universe, until another squall would upset everything, and we would lower our sails, waiting for a further spell of fine weather, and when it came, it was neither slow nor uncertain, but complete, trustworthy, and sure.
Excuse these metaphors; they smell of the sea and the tide which brought death to my friend, my wife’s lover, Escobar. They smell, too, of Capitu’s undertow eyes. So, though I have always been a landsman, I recount that part of my life, as a sailor would recount his shipwreck.
Now all that remained for us to do was to say was the final word; we read it, however, clear and unavoidable, in each other’s eyes, and every time that Ezequiel was with us, he only drove us further apart. Capitu proposed that we should put him in a school, and that he should only come home on Saturdays; the boy was not at all willing to accept this situation.
“I want to go with Papa! Papa must go with me!” he shouted.
It was I who took him one morning, a Monday. It was in the old Largo da Lapa, near our house. I look him on foot, holding his hand, as I had carried the other one’s coffin. The lad was crying and asking questions at every step, if he would come back home, and when, and if I would go and see him…
“I’ll come.”
“You won’t!”
“I will.”
“Swear it, Papa!”
“All right.”
“You haven’t sworn!”
“I swear it, then.”
And there I took him and left him. The temporary absence did not diminish the evil, and all Capitu’s subtle arts to at least lessen it might as well not have existed; I felt worse and worse. The new situation even aggravated my suffering. Ezequiel was now out of my sight more; but his return at weekends, whether it was because I got out of the habit of seeing him, or because time went on and completed the resemblance, was the return of a livelier, noisier Escobar. Even his voice: in a short time, it seemed to be the same, too. On Saturdays, I tried not to dine at home, and only to come in when he was asleep; but I couldn’t escape on Sundays, in my study, surrounded by newspapers and legal papers. Ezequiel would come in boisterous and cheerful, full of laughter and of love, for the little devil grew more and more fond of me. I, to tell the truth, now felt an aversion that I could hardly disguise, either to her or to others. Not being able to cover up this moral disposition entirely, I tried to keep out of his way, to see him as little as I could; I would have work which would make me lock myself in my study, or I would go out on Sundays to take my secret wound for a walk round the city and its outskirts.