But then after evoking the horrible instruments and the fragile justifications for their use, he invites us to think of both the slave catcher and a caught slave as human beings capable of love and distress. The slave catcher and his wife are very much in love and desperately want to have a child. At last they have a son, but then they have no money—the trade is not going well. They are evicted from their house, and the man is about to leave his son at the foundling hospital, when he sees and arrests a runaway female slave. He is the father named in the title, and she is the mother. I won’t reveal the plot further, since the point is to signal the incredible poise and moral reach of Machado’s narrator. We don’t exactly feel sympathy for the man, but we are tempted to something like it, even if our minds are still full of the thought of those horrible implements described at the story’s start. Of course the system doesn’t excuse him, but he didn’t invent the self-serving regime of “human and social order” that everyone is so happy to take as a norm.