Eventually the streetcar stopped outside the house and her husband got off; the garden gate creaked open. Mariana went to the window and peered out. Conrado was walking slowly up the garden path, looking to left and right, his hat on his head—not the famous hat he always wore, but another one, the one his wife had asked him to wear that very morning. It came as a rude shock to Mariana, just like the flowerpot in the garden being moved, or as if she’d come across a page of Voltaire in her copy of Moreninha or Ivanhoe. It was a jarring note in the harmonious sonata of life. No, that hat would never do. Really, whatever had possessed her to make him get rid of the old one that suited him so well? Even if it wasn’t perhaps the most appropriate of hats, it had served him for many years, and framed his face so well . . . Conrado came in through a side door. Mariana flung her arms around him.

“So, is it over?” he asked, circling her waist.

“Listen, darling,” she replied, giving him the divinest of kisses, “throw that hat away; the other one’s much nicer.”

Ex Cathedra

EX CATHEDRA

“YOU’LL GO BLIND like that, Godfather.”

“What?”

“You’ll go blind; you read as if there were no tomorrow. Go on, give me the book.”

Caetaninha took the book from his hands. Her godfather turned on his heel and went into his study, where there was no shortage of books. He shut the door behind him and carried on reading. It was his vice; he read to excess—morning, noon, and night, at lunch and dinner, in bed, after his bath, while walking or standing up, in the house and in the garden; he read before reading and he read after reading. He read every sort of book, but especially law (for he was a law graduate), mathematics, and philosophy; recently, he had also taken up the natural sciences.

Worse than going blind, he went mad. It was toward the end of 1873, up in Tijuca, that he began to show signs of mental derangement. But since the episodes were few and insignificant, it was only in March or April 1874 that his goddaughter noticed the change. One day, over lunch, he interrupted his reading to ask her:

“What’s my name again?”

“What’s your name?” she repeated, shocked. “Your name is Fulgêncio.”

“From this day forth, you shall call me Fulgencius.”