One night, as Dona Benedita was turning this problem over in her mind while standing at the window of the house on the shore at Botafogo, where she had moved to some months earlier, she saw a most unusual spectacle. It began as an opaque glow, like a light filtered through frosted glass, filling the inlet of the bay beyond. Against this backdrop appeared a floating, transparent figure, wreathed in mist and veiled in shimmering reflections, its shape disappearing into thin air. The figure came right up to Dona Benedita’s windowsill, and, drowsily, in a childish voice, spoke these meaningless words:

“Marry . . . don’t marry . . . if you do marry . . . you will marry . . . you won’t marry . . . you will marry . . . get married . . .”

Dona Benedita froze in terror, but still had strength enough to ask the figure who she was. The ghostly figure began to laugh, but that laughter quickly faded, and she replied that she was the fairy who had presided over Dona Benedita’s birth. “My name is Indecision,” said the fairy, and, like a sigh, dissolved into the night and the silence.

The Loan

THE LOAN

I’M GOING TO TELL YOU an anecdote, an anecdote in the true sense of the word, which common usage has since broadened out to include any brief, invented tale. This anecdote happens to be true: I can cite several people who know it as well as I do. Nor would it have remained hidden from view had some tranquil soul been capable of discerning its philosophical implications. As you know, everything has a philosophical meaning. Carlyle discovered the philosophy of vests, or, rather, of clothes, and everyone knows that numbers were used in the Pythagorean system long before the Ipiranga lottery. For my part, I think I have deciphered the meaning behind this tale of a loan; you will see if I am mistaken.

To begin with, let us amend what Seneca said. In the eyes of that stern moralist, every day is, in itself, a singular life; in other words, a life within life. I wouldn’t disagree with that, but why did he not add that often a single hour can encapsulate a whole life? Observe this young man: he enters the world with great ambitions: a ministerial portfolio perhaps, his own bank, a viscount’s coronet, a bishop’s crozier. At fifty, we will find him working as a lowly customs inspector, or as a sacristan in some country parish. This transformation took place over a period of thirty years, and no doubt a Balzac could have fit it all into a mere three hundred pages; so why shouldn’t life, which was, after all, Balzac’s teacher, squeeze it into thirty or sixty minutes?