And, with the same swaying gait, Conceição slipped silently back down the corridor. I went out into the street, where my neighbor was waiting. We set off to the church. More than once during mass, the figure of Conceição interposed itself between me and the priest, but let’s put that down to my seventeen years. The following morning, over breakfast, I described the mass and the congregation, but Conceição showed not a flicker of interest. During the day, she was her usual natural, benign self and made no mention of our conversation the previous night. At New Year, I went home to Mangaratiba. By the time I returned to Rio in March, the notary had died of apoplexy. Conceição was living in Engenho Novo, but I neither visited her nor met her again. I later heard that she had married her late husband’s articled clerk.

Canary Thoughts

CANARY THOUGHTS

A KEEN ORNITHOLOGIST, Macedo by name, once told some friends a story so extraordinary that none of them believed him. Some even thought Macedo had lost his mind. Here is a summary of that tale.

I was walking down a street at the beginning of last month—he said—when a cab came careering past and almost knocked me over. I escaped by jumping into the doorway of a junk shop. Neither the clatter of horse and cab nor my sudden irruption into his shop roused the owner, who was in the back, dozing in a folding chair. He was a ruin of a man, with a grubby, straw-colored beard and, on his head, a tattered cap that had doubtless failed to find a buyer. He appeared to be a man without a past, unlike some of the objects he was selling, and yet he did not exude the air of austere, embittered sadness you might expect of a man who did once have a life.

The shop was dark and crammed with the bent, broken, grimy, rusty objects one usually finds in such places, and all in the state of semi-disorder one would expect. However banal, though, this motley collection of detritus was not without interest. Filling the area around the shop door were pots without lids, lids without pots, buttons, shoes, locks, a black skirt, straw hats and fur hats, picture frames, a pair of binoculars, tailcoats, a fencing foil, a stuffed dog, slippers, gloves, various nondescript vases, some epaulets, a velvet bag, two coat racks, a catapult, a thermometer, some chairs, a lithograph of a portrait by Sisson, a backgammon set, two wire masks for some future carnival, as well as other things I either didn’t even see or have forgotten, all leaning or hanging or on display in equally ancient glass cases. Farther in there was still more shabby merchandise, mostly larger pieces of furniture, dressers and chairs and beds piled one on top of the other, lost in the gloom.