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really doesn’t matter. It’s just that I don’t like it. (. . .) All right. (. . .) Good. Don’t be too late. (. . .) And don’t forget to send the monthly bill. (. . .) Goodbye.”
    She put the phone down and again fell back onto the bed. She yawned widely, with the ease of someone who knows no one is watching, a yawn that revealed the absence of one of her back teeth.
    Lídia was not pretty. Analyzed feature by feature, her face could not be categorized as either beautiful or ordinary. She was at a disadvantage just now because she had no makeup on. Her face was shiny with night cream and her eyebrows needed plucking at the ends. No, Lídia was not pretty, and there was, too, the important fact that she had already passed her thirty-second birthday and her thirty-third was not far off. And yet there was something irresistible about her. Her dark brown eyes, her dark hair. When she was tired, her face took on an almost masculine hardness, especially around the mouth and nostrils, but with just the slightest change of expression it became flattering and seductive. She was not the kind of woman who relies solely on her body to attract men; instead, she radiated sensuality from head to toe. She was skillful enough to be able to dredge up from within herself the kind of tremulous, shivering cry that could drive a lover quite mad with passion and render him incapable of defending himself against something he assumed to be perfectly natural and spontaneous, against that simulated wave into which he plunged in the belief that it was real. Yes, Lídia knew how to do that. These were the cards she had to play, her trump card being that sensual body of hers, slim as a reed and sensitive as a slender rod of steel.
    She could not decide whether to go back to sleep or to get up. She was thinking about Maria Cláudia, about her fresh, adolescent beauty, and for a moment, though she knew it was foolish to compare herself to a mere child, she felt her heart contract and a frown of envy wrinkle her brow. She decided to get dressed, apply her makeup and put the greatest possible distance between Maria Cláudia’s youthfulness and her own seductive powers as an experienced woman of the world. She sat up. She had turned on the boiler earlier, and the water for her bath was ready. She removed her dressing gown in a single movement, then grasped the hem of her nightdress and pulled it up over her head. She stood there completely naked. She tested the water and allowed herself to slide into the tub. She washed herself slowly. Lídia knew the value of cleanliness for someone in her situation.
    Clean and refreshed, she wrapped herself in a bathrobe and went into the kitchen. Before returning to the bedroom, she put the kettle on to boil for tea.
    Back in her bedroom, she chose a simple but charming dress, which clung to her body and made her look younger, and quickly applied a little makeup, pleased with herself and the night cream she was currently using. Then she returned to the kitchen, where the kettle was already boiling. She took it off the gas. When she looked in the tea caddy, however, she found it was empty. She frowned, put down the tin and went back to her bedroom. She was about to phone the grocer’s and had even picked up the receiver when she heard someone talking out in the street. She opened the window.
    The mist had lifted and the sky was blue, the watery blue of early spring. The sun seemed to come from very far away, so far away that the air was refreshingly cool.
    From the window of the ground-floor apartment a woman was issuing instructions, then repeating them to a fair-haired boy who was gazing up at her, wrinkling his little nose in concentration. The woman spoke voluminously and with a strong Spanish accent. The boy had already grasped that his mother wanted him to buy ten tostões’ worth of pepper and was ready to set off, but she kept repeating what