Crispim blenched. What important matter could it be, if not some sad news of the traveling party, in particular his wife? For this point must be clearly stated, given how much the chroniclers insisted upon it: Crispim loved his wife dearly and, in thirty years of marriage, they had never been apart for even one day. This would explain the muttered private monologues he often indulged in, and which his assistants often overheard: “What on earth were you thinking of? What possessed you to agree to letting Cesária go with her? Lackey, miserable lackey! And all to get into Dr. Bacamarte’s good books. Well, now you just have to grin and bear it; that’s right, grin and bear it, you vile, miserable lickspittle. You just say Amen to everything, don’t you? Well, now you’ve got your comeuppance, you filthy blackguard!” And many other such insults that a man should never say to anyone, still less to himself. Thus it is not hard to imagine the effect of Bacamarte’s message. Soares instantly dropped what he was doing and rushed to the Casa Verde.

Simão Bacamarte received him with the joy that befits a man of learning, that is to say, a joy buttoned up to the neck with circumspection.

“I am very happy,” he said.

“News of our womenfolk?” asked the apothecary, his voice trembling.

The alienist made a grand gesture and replied:

“No, it concerns something far more exalted: a scientific experiment. I say experiment, because I am not so rash as to assert my conclusions with absolute certainty, and because science, Senhor Soares, is nothing if not a constant search. So we shall call it, therefore, an experiment, but one that will change the very face of the Earth. Madness, the object of my studies, was, until now, considered a mere island in an ocean of reason; I am now beginning to suspect that it is a continent.”

Upon saying this, he fell silent, the better to savor the apothecary’s astonishment. Then he explained his idea at length. As he saw it, insanity afflicted a vast swath of humanity, an idea he expounded with copious arguments, texts, and examples. He cited examples both from Itaguaí itself and from history: being the rarefied intellectual he was, he recognized the dangers of drawing all his examples from Itaguaí, and sought refuge in history. He thus drew particular attention to several famous persons such as Socrates, who had his own personal demon, to Pascal, who always imagined a yawning abyss lay somewhere to his left, to Caracalla, Domitian, Caligula, and so on, a whole string of cases and people, the repulsive and the ridiculous. Since the apothecary seemed taken aback by such a promiscuous mixture, the alienist told him that it all amounted to the same thing, even adding sententiously:

“Ferocity, Senhor Soares, is merely the serious side of the grotesque.”

“Witty, very witty indeed!” exclaimed Crispim Soares, throwing his hands in the air.