Memoir From Antproof Case Read Online Free PDF Page A

breasts were heavily covered with powder and rouge. I began to see her, and then I began to see my doctor. Nothing is as chilling as sex in reprisal, except perhaps that this sad and abandoned woman had offered herself to me because she pitied my age.
    You cannot abrogate the passage of time, so I returned to the quiet benches in the parks where old people are supposed to sit, and I returned to walking up the mountain, and there, in the dim asexual beauty of reddening dawns and skies that finned to blue, I discovered my real and appropriate strengths.
    Funio is going to rise above his difficult origins. I have been a father to him, and my greatest sorrow is that I will die when he is young. But though he will cry I don't think it will break his stride, or, at least, I hope it does not. I can think of nothing I would rather do than live another forty or fifty years and watch him move through the world. He wallops you with his brilliance. I don't like the idea of child prodigies, and we are trying to ignore that part of him, for a brilliant child can be ruined if he is made to do tricks like a circus animal.
    When Funio was four years old he thought that license plates were price tags, and he was amazed that they seemed to vary nonsensically. I was taken aback one day when we were driving to São Conrado and he asked why the Volkswagen ahead of us was more than three times as expensive as a Rolls Royce. "It isn't," I said.
    "But look at the price tags!" he chirped.
    When it hit me that he could do long division both instantly and accurately, I began to ask him questions. Just before we walked onto the beach I asked him one that I'll never forget. "Funio," I said, "let us say that the number of letters in your name is
X,
the number of letters in Mama's first name is
Y
, and that
X
plus
Y
minus
Z
equals ten."
    "
Z equals two,
" he said, as if to say, "What else, stupid?"
    When he was five he wanted to run the checkbook, so we taught him double-entry accounting, which he mastered without a hitch. Last year he began to correct some of the papers and exams from the naval academy—as he is perfectly bilingual.
    What is to become of such a child? We have made him promise not to accelerate his progress in school, to hold himself in check at least until he goes to university, so he can be a child. He is socially and emotionally a child, and one grows not only according to the pace of one's intellect but in the cultivation of one's heart and soul. Not that they have been too far outdistanced by his mind—they haven't, but the lessons of the spirit take longer, and because they are often received like blows, they tempt the weak and cowardly into imagining that they can be manipulated like an algebraic quantity, or rushed, or controlled, when they can only be endured.
    He does merely perfectly at school, and when they try to accelerate him he clams up. In class he daydreams and does problems in his head. At home he reads history, novels, the encyclopedia, and of late he has become interested in economics, to which he was led by his interest in statistics.
    And he is a little thing, as dark as a Sicilian, with enormous eyes and his mother's Chiclet-sized glacially white teeth, but his are configured differently, the two upper front teeth being inappropriately massive, except perhaps for a chipmunk.
    His school uniform seems like part of him. Except when he was a baby, he has never appeared in anything but blue shorts and a white shirt. He swims in the shorts, I suppose, because he sees that I swim in my khaki shorts, and he knows the story of how I went down in the sea.
    Perhaps it is justice, or a miracle, that he can absorb anything I tell him, for I love him above all, and I cannot last long. When he was a baby, I took him on my walks, I carried him up the mountain, and at the top we went to the place where I always go, where I held him on my lap and we watched the sea below, the tiny whitecaps moving just above the power of