“Yes, two. Every human creature contains two souls: one that looks from the inside out, and the other that looks from the outside in. Go on, gawk, stare, shrug your shoulders, whatever you like, but don’t say anything. If you try to argue, I’ll finish my cigar and go home to bed. Now, the external soul can be a spirit, a fluid, a man (or many men), an object, even an action. There are cases, for example, of a simple shirt button being a person’s external soul, or it could be the polka, a card game, a book, a machine, a pair of boots, a song, a drum, etc. Clearly, the function of this second soul, like the first, is to transmit life; together they complete the man, who is, metaphysically speaking, an orange. Whoever loses one half, automatically loses half of his existence, and there have been instances, quite common ones, in which the loss of the external soul implies the loss of one’s entire existence. Shylock, for example. The external soul of that particular Jew was his ducats; to lose them was the same as dying. ‘I shall never see my gold again,’ he says to Tubal; ‘thou stick’st a dagger in me.’ Consider carefully his choice of words: for him, the loss of the ducats, his external soul, meant death. One must, of course, remember that the external soul does not always stay the same—”

“No?”

“Indeed not, sir; it changes both in nature and in state. I am not alluding to certain all-consuming souls, such as one’s country, of which Camões famously said that he would not only die in his country, but with it; or power, which was Caesar’s and Cromwell’s external soul. These are forceful, all-excluding souls, but others, though still forceful, are changeable in nature. There are gentlemen, for example, whose external soul in their earliest years is a rattle or a hobbyhorse, but later on in life it will be their seat on the board of a charity. For my part, I know a lady—and a charming creature she is too—who changes her external soul five or six times a year. During the season it’s the opera, and when the season is over, she swaps her external soul for another: a concert, a ball at the Cassino, a trip to Rua do Ouvidor or Petrópolis—”

“Excuse me, but who is this lady?”

“The lady is the devil’s kin and bears the same name: her name is Legion. And there are many other such cases. I myself have experienced these changes. I won’t recount them now because it would take too long; I will confine myself to the episode I mentioned earlier. At the time, I was twenty-five years old . . .”