You can imagine my anguish. Fortunately, though, I had by then recovered from my exhausted state and, after only a few hours, I was able to go out onto the veranda and into the garden. Not a sign of the canary. I made inquiries, I went here, there, and everywhere, I advertised, but all in vain. I had already compiled my notes for the article, however truncated and incomplete, when I happened to visit a friend, who lived in one of the largest and most beautiful mansions in the area. We went for a stroll in the garden before supper, when I heard a voice trill out this question:

“Hello, Senhor Macedo, where did you disappear to?”

It was the canary. He was perched on the branch of a tree. You can imagine my feelings and what I said to him. My friend thought I had gone mad, but what did I care what my friends thought? I addressed the canary tenderly, begging him to come back and resume our conversation, in our world composed of garden, fountain, veranda, and white circular cage . . .

“What garden? What fountain?”

“The world, my dear friend.”

“What world? I see you have lost none of your bad professorial habits. The world,” he concluded solemnly, “is an infinite blue space, with the sun up above.”

I indignantly retorted that, if he was to be believed, the world was everything and anything; it had even been a junk shop . . .

“A junk shop?” he trilled mockingly. “Do such things exist?

Father Against Mother

FATHER AGAINST MOTHER

LIKE MANY OTHER social institutions, slavery brought with it certain trades and implements. I will mention only a few of those implements because of their connection with a particular trade. There was the neck iron, the leg iron, and the iron muzzle. The muzzle covered the mouth as a way of putting a stop to the vice of drunkenness among slaves. It had only three holes, two to see through and one to breathe through, and was fastened at the back of the head with a padlock. Along with the vice of drunkenness, the muzzle also did away with the temptation to steal, because slaves tended to steal their master’s money in order to slake their thirst, and thus two grave sins were abolished, and sobriety and honesty saved. The muzzle was a grotesque thing, but then human and social order cannot always be achieved without the grotesque or, indeed, without occasional acts of cruelty. The tinsmiths would hang them up at the doors of their shops. But that’s enough of muzzles for the moment.