I won’t tell you how I suffered then, only that my first impulse was to shoot them both. I did shoot them in my imagination, and watched them dying, gasping, begging for my forgiveness. This was a purely hypothetical revenge; in reality, I did nothing. They married, and went to the hills of Tijuca to watch the rising of their honeymoon moon. I was left rereading the widow’s letters. “As God is my witness,” said one of them, “my love is eternal, and I am yours, eternally yours . . .” And, in my bewilderment, I muttered blasphemies to myself: “Ours is a jealous God; he will suffer no eternity but his, and that is why he repudiated the widow’s words; nor will he suffer any dogma but Catholic dogma, and that is why he repudiated my friend’s words.” This was how I explained the loss of my fiancée and the fifty mil-réis.

I left the capital and went to practice as a country lawyer, but not for long. Misfortune rode behind me on my mule, and wherever I got off, it got off with me. I saw its finger in everything, in the cases that never came my way, in the ones that did come but were worth little or nothing, and in the ones that were worth something but were invariably lost. Besides the fact that clients who win are generally more grateful than the other sort, my succession of defeats discouraged other litigants from contacting me. After a year and a half, I returned to Rio and set myself up with an old companion from my student days, Gonçalves.

Gonçalves was the least juridically minded fellow imaginable, and the least suited to grappling with matters of law. In fact, he was an utter good-for-nothing. If one were to compare mental activity to an elegant house, Gonçalves was incapable of even ten minutes of polite drawing-room conversation—he would always be sneaking off down to the pantry to gossip with the servants. However, this baseness was compensated by a certain lucidity and agility in grasping less arduous or less complex subjects, together with a facility of expression and an almost uninterrupted good humor—something which for me, a poor devil beaten down by fortune, was not to be sneezed at. In the early days, when we had no cases to work on, we passed the time in excellent conversation, lively and animated, in which he always took the better part, whether discussing politics or—a subject that was of particular interest to him—women.