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investigations, which, although they didn't go all the way, left us both with unforgettable memories, at least in my case, for even now I can see her, naked from the waist down. Later on, when the two Barata brothers were already living in Praça do Chile, I would go and visit them, my sights set on Domitília, but since, by then, we were both grown up and fully equipped, we found it hard to find a moment alone. It was also in Rua Padre Sena Freitas that I slept (or didn't sleep) part of the night with a slightly older girl cousin (she had the same name, Maria da Piedade, as my mother, who as well as being her aunt was also her godmother) when we were put in the same bed, head to toe. A vain precaution on the part of our ingenuous mothers. While they returned to the kitchen and resumed the conversation we weren't supposed to hear and which they had interrupted in order to take us to bed, where they had covered us up and tucked us in with their own fond hands, we, after a few minutes of anxious waiting, hearts pounding, underneath the sheet and the blanket, in the dark, began a meticulous, mutual, tactile exploration of our bodies with more than justifiable urgency and eagerness, but in a way that was not just methodical, but also, in the circumstances, as instructive as we could make it from the anatomical point of view. I remember that the first move on my part, the first attack, so to speak, brought my right foot into contact with Piedade's already bushy pubis. We were pretending to sleep like angels when, later that night, Aunt Maria Mogas, who was married to a brother of my father's called Francisco, came to get her up and take her home. Ah, yes, those were innocent times.

    We must have lived in Rua Padre Sena Freitas for two or three years. That was where we were living when the Spanish Civil War broke out. The move to Rua Carlos Ribeiro must have happened in 1938, or perhaps even 1937. And unless my still, for the moment, serviceable memory allows different dates and references to surface, it's hard, not to say impossible, for me to place certain events in time, but I'm sure that the next incident I'm going to tell you about took place before the war in Spain. A very popular game at the time among the lower classes, one that anyone could make at home (I had hardly any toys, and those I had were made of tin and had been bought in the street from itinerant sellers), consisted of a small rectangular board with twenty-two nails hammered into it, eleven on each side, distributed much as footballers used to be before the emergence of moderntactics, that is, five in front, the forwards, three behind them, the midfielders, also known as halves, two others, known as defenders or backs, and finally the goalkeeper. You could play the game using a marble or, better still, a ball bearing, which you guided in between the nails with a small spatula, then pushed it between two posts (because there were goalposts too) and thus scored a goal. People, both children and grown-ups, had enormous fun with these very meager materials, and hard-fought contests and championships were fought. Seen from this distance, it seems, and perhaps very briefly was, a golden age. Not that this was always the case, as you will see. One day, my father and I were on the rear balcony playing (I recall that families with few possessions spent most of their time at the back of the house, mainly in the kitchen), I was sitting on the ground and he on a small wooden bench of the kind that was commonplace then and considered indispensable, especially to the women of the household, who sat there to do their sewing. Standing behind me, watching the game, was Antonio Barata. My father was not a man to let his son beat him and so, implacably, and taking advantage of my limited skill, he scored goal after goal. Barata, as an officer in the Criminal Investigation Department, must have had plenty of training in different ways of putting psychological pressure on the