Nowadays, I think the nickname wasn’t right, and was just a bit prejudiced. The Lyceum wasn’t a completely worthless school; there was an atmosphere of daring that flouted the norm and scared conventional people. The scum of Manaus frequented it, and I was carried along by the mass of half-wits. No one there was très raisonnable, in the words of the French master, himself an eccentric, a dandy exiled to the provinces, who recited symbolist poets, and ended up merely aping his own eccentricity. He didn’t teach grammar; instead he recited, in his baritone, the illuminations and green snows of the French symbolist he adored the most. Who was going to understand these refulgent images? Everyone succumbed to the enchantment of his voice, and someone, in a flash, would grasp something, feel a spark, and lose his bearings. After the “class,” in front of the Café Mocambo, he would intone the praises of Diana, the bronze goddess, elegantly beautiful in the Praça das Acacias. These tributes then passed from the goddess to a girl in uniform, completely Indian, with a coppery complexion, and bursting with desire; the two of them together would slip away from the Mocambo, and disappear into the night, in the unlit city.

This master, Antenor Laval, was the first to welcome the new pupil, just expelled from the Brothers’ school. He was delighted, and wanted to know what the reason for this summary expulsion was. Omar didn’t hide the true version from anyone: it was the most insubordinate, the vilest act in the whole history of the Salesian missions in Amazonia, he said. He told everyone the story. He told it in front of the pupils in the Vandals’ Cockpit, in a loud voice, laughing when he said that the Polish priest who had humiliated him could only eat soup, and would never be able to chew his food again. It had happened in the math teacher’s class; Bolislau was a red-faced giant with an athlete’s build, always in his black, greasy, sweaty cassock. His sadistic eyes looked for a victim, and fixed on Omar. Bolislau asked a really difficult question, and, when he got no answer, made a mockery of him. Omar got up, went to the blackboard, stood there in front of giant Bolislau, and gave him a punch on the jaw and a kick in the balls: fearsome blows that made poor Bolislau double up like a hunchback and reel around like a falling top. He didn’t cry out; he grunted. His pale eyes, wet with tears, bulged out in his ashen face. There was a commotion in the room, and laughter, some nervous, some delighted, before silence fell, and the headmaster came in with his posse of monitors.