Notaries should not attempt wit, or at least not the caustic sort. At this last piece of news, his niece felt a drop of soothing balm, which cured her twinge of envy. It was all true. A few days later, Pestana married a widow age twenty-seven, a fine singer and a consumptive. She would be the spiritual wife of his creative genius. Celibacy was doubtless the cause of his sterile, errant ways, he told himself; artistically he considered himself a wandering outcast of the dead of night; his polkas were merely his foppish fancies. Now, finally, he was going to beget a whole family of works that were serious, profound, inspired, and finely polished.

Such hopes had budded in the very first hours of love, and blossomed at the first dawn of married life. “Maria,” his soul stammered, “give me what I could find neither in the solitude of night, nor in the turmoil of day.”

Straightaway, to celebrate their union, he had the idea of composing a nocturne. He would call it Ave Maria. It was as though happiness brought with it the beginnings of inspiration; not wanting to say anything to his wife before it was ready, he worked in secret, which was difficult, since Maria, also a fervent music lover, would come and play with him, or simply listen, for hours and hours, in the room with the portraits. They even put on a few weekly concerts, with three of Pestana’s musician friends. One Sunday, however, he could contain himself no longer and called his wife into the room to play her a passage from the nocturne; he did not tell her what it was, nor who it was by. Suddenly, stopping, he looked at her inquiringly.

“Don’t stop,” said Maria. “It’s Chopin, isn’t it?”

Pestana went pale, stared into space, repeated one or two passages, and stood up. Maria sat down at the piano, and, struggling slightly to remember, played the piece by Chopin. The idea and the motif were the same; Pestana had discovered them in some dark alleyway of his memory, that perfidious old city. Sad and despairing, he left the house and headed toward the bridge, in the direction of São Cristóvão.

“Why struggle?” he asked himself. “I’ll stick to polkas . . . Long live the polka!”

Passersby hearing this stared at him as if he were mad. He carried on walking, delirious, tormented, an eternal shuttlecock between his ambition and his vocation. He passed the old slaughterhouse; when he came to the railroad crossing, he had the notion of walking up the tracks and waiting for the first train to come and crush him. The guard made him turn back. He came to his senses and went home.