But slowly the cases began to arrive; among them a dispute about a mortgage. It concerned the house of a customs official, Temístocles de Sá Botelho, who had no other assets and didn’t want to lose his property. I took charge of the matter. Temístocles was delighted with me, and, two weeks later, when I told him I wasn’t married, he laughed and said he wanted nothing to do with bachelors. He said one or two other things, too, and invited me to dinner that Sunday. I went, and fell in love with his daughter, Dona Rufina, a very pretty girl of nineteen, but rather shy and insipid. Perhaps it’s her upbringing, I thought. We married a few months later. I didn’t, of course, invite misfortune to the wedding, but inside the church, among the neatly trimmed beards and luxuriant side-whiskers, I thought I saw the sardonic face and glancing eyes of my cruel adversary. It was for this reason that, when the time came to utter the sacred and irreversible vows of marriage, I trembled and hesitated before, finally, stammeringly repeating the priest’s words . . .

I was married. It is true that Rufina lacked brilliance and elegance; it was immediately apparent, for example, that she would never be a society hostess. She did, however, possess the qualities of a good housewife, and that was all I asked for. A quiet life was enough for me, and as long as she filled that life, all would be well. But this was precisely the fly in the ointment. If you will permit me a chromatic illustration, Rufina’s soul was not black like Lady Macbeth’s, or red like Cleopatra’s, or blue like Juliet’s, or white like Beatrice’s, but gray and dull like the lumpen mass of humanity. She was kind only out of apathy, faithful but not out of virtue, friendly but never intentionally tender. An angel might carry her up to heaven, or the devil down to hell, in either case without any struggle on her part, and without her meriting either glory in the first case or shame in the second. Hers was the passivity of a sleepwalker. She was not in the least bit vain. Her father had hatched the marriage because he wanted his son-in-law to be a man with a profession; she accepted me just as she would have accepted any sacristan, magistrate, general, civil servant, or lieutenant, and not out of impatience to be married, but out of obedience to her family and, to a certain extent, so as to be like everyone else. All the other women had husbands, so she wanted one too. Nothing could have been more antipathetic to my nature, but married I was.