Well, I was already in this house when one day, as I was dressing for lunch, I received a visiting card with this name:
“Is the person there?” I asked the servant.
“Yes, sir; he’s waiting.”
I didn’t go straight away; I made him wait for ten or fifteen minutes in the living room. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I should be somewhat excited, and should run in, embrace him and speak to him of his mother. His mother—I don’t think I’ve said that she was dead and buried. She was; there she rests in the earth of old Switzerland. I hurriedly finished dressing. When I came out of my room, I took on a father’s air, somewhere between gentle and brusque, half Dom Casmurro. When I came into the room, I saw a young man, with his back to me, looking at the bust of Massinissa painted on the wall. I trod carefully, making no sound. Nevertheless, he heard my steps, and quickly turned round. He knew me by my photographs and ran towards me. I didn’t move; it was no more, no less than my former young companion at the seminary of São José, a little shorter, less full in the body, and apart from the high coloring of his complexion, the same face as my friend. He was dressed in the modern fashion, of course, and his manners were different, but his general demeanor reproduced the dead man. It was the same, the exact, the true Escobar. It was my wife’s lover; he was his father’s son. He was in mourning for his mother; I too was in black. We sat down.
“You look the same as in your latest photographs, Papa,” he said to me.
His voice was the same as Escobar’s, with a French accent. I explained to him that in fact I had changed very little, and began asking him questions, so as to have to speak less, and keep control of my emotions. But even this brought animation to his face, and my seminary friend began to arise even more from the cemetery. Here he was before me, with the same laughter and a greater respect; all in all, the same politeness and the same charm. He was eager to see me. His mother had spoken of me often, with the greatest praise, as the purest man in the world, the most worthy of love.
“She was beautiful at her death,” he ended.
“Let’s go in to lunch.”
If you think the lunch was unpleasant, you are mistaken. It had its moments of irritation, it’s true; at first it hurt me that Ezequiel was not really my son, that he didn’t complete me and continue me. If the lad had taken after his mother, I would have ended up believing everything, the more easily so because he seemed to have left only yesterday. He conjured up memories of his childhood, of episodes and words spoken, the time when he went to school.
“Do you still remember when you took me to school, Papa?” he asked, laughing.
“Am I likely to have forgotten?”
“It was in the Lapa; I was desperate, and you wouldn’t stop, pulling me like I don’t know what, and me with my little legs … Yes, I will, thank you.”
He held out his glass for the wine I was offering him, took a sip, and went on eating. Escobar used to eat that way too, with his face in his plate. He told me of his life in Europe, his studies, and particularly of archaeology, which was his passion. He spoke with real enthusiasm of antiquity, told me about Egypt and its thousands of centuries, without mixing up his figures: he had his father’s head for arithmetic. Even though the idea of the other’s paternity was quite familiar to me, I took no pleasure in the ressurrection. At times, I shut my eyes so as not to see gestures or anything, but the young devil talked and laughed, and the dead man laughed and talked through him.
Since there was nothing for it but for him to stay with me, I made myself into a real father. The idea that he might have seen some photograph of Escobar that Capitu might have incautiously carried round with her, did not occur to me, nor, if it had, would the thought have lasted. Ezequiel believed in me, as he believed in his mother. If José Dias had been alive, he would have thought him the image of me. Cousin Justina wanted to see him, but since she was ill, she asked me to take him there. But I knew my relative. I think that the desire to see Ezequiel was so that she could see rounded out the sketch that in all likelihood she had seen in the boy. It would be a final treat; I prevented it in time.
“She’s very ill,” I said to Ezequiel, who wanted to go and see her, “any emotion might bring on her death. We’ll go and see her when she’s better.”
We didn’t go; death took her a few days later. There she sleeps with the Lord, or whatever the phrase is. Ezequiel saw her face in the coffin and didn’t recognize her, nor would he be able to, after what the years and death had done to her. On the way to the cemetery, he remembered a few things, a street, a tower, a stretch of beach, and he was all happiness. That was what happened every time he came back home, at the end of the day; he recounted the memories brought back to him by the streets and the houses. He was astonished that many were the same as when he had left them behind, as if houses died young.
After six months, Ezequiel spoke to me of a journey to Greece, to Egypt and Palestine, a scientific journey, a promise made to some friends.
“Of which sex?” I asked laughing.
He smiled embarrassed, and answered that women were such creatures of fashion and of the present moment, that they would never understand a ruin thirty centuries old. They were two fellow students from the university. I promised him resources, and immediately gave him an advance on the money he needed. To myself I said that one of the consequences of the secret loves of the father was that I was paying for the son’s archaeology; I’d rather have paid for a dose of leprosy … When this idea passed through my brain, I felt so cruel and perverse that I took hold of the lad, and went to embrace him to my heart, but I retreated; then I looked at him, as one does a real son; the look he gave me was tender and grateful.