The Complete Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

fragility.
    I hadn’t meant to frighten him, but I managed to. And one day, when I’d already forgotten my “convalescent” pose, they informed me that I was to spend two months in Belo Horizonte, where the good climate and new environment would strengthen me. Argument was out of the question. Jaime took me there, on a night train. He found me a nice boardinghouse and departed, leaving me alone, with nothing to do, suddenly launched into a freedom I hadn’t asked for and didn’t know how to use.
    Perhaps that was the start. Out of my sphere, far from the things that seemed like they’d always been there, I felt unsupported because in the end not even conventional wisdom had taken root in me, so superficially had I been living. What had kept me going until then were not convictions, but the people who held them. For the very first time they were giving me a chance to
see
with my own eyes. For the very first time they were isolating me with myself. Judging from the letters I wrote during that time and read much later, I notice that a feeling of distress had seized me. In all of them I mentioned coming home, desiring it with a certain anxiety. That is, until Daniel.
    I cannot, even now, recall Daniel’s face. I mean my first impressions of that physiognomy of his, altogether different from the assemblage I later got used to. Only then, unfortunately a bit too late, did I manage through daily proximity to comprehend and absorb his features. But they were different . . . Of the first Daniel I’ve retained nothing, except the imprint.
    I know that he was smiling, that’s all. From time to time, some isolated feature of his comes to mind, from the former days. His long and curved fingers, those thick, wide-set brows. That’s all. Because he overpowered me in a way that, if I can put it like this, almost prevented me from seeing him. I really do believe that my later anguish was intensified by this impossibility of reconstructing his appearance. So all I possessed were his words, the memory of his soul, everything that wasn’t human in Daniel. And during nights of insomnia, unable to reconstruct him mentally, already exhausted by these futile attempts, I’d glimpse him as you might a shadow, huge, with shifting contours, looming oppressive yet also distant as a threat. Like a painter who bends the treetops in order to capture a gust of wind on his canvas, sending hair and skirts flying, I could only ever manage to recall him by transporting me to myself, to the version from that time. I martyred myself with accusations, despised myself and, hurt and brokenhearted, lodged him vividly inside myself.
    But I must start at the beginning, to put a bit of order into this narrative of mine . . .
    Daniel lived in the boardinghouse where I was staying. He never approached me, nor had I ever particularly noticed him. Until one day I heard him speak, entering suddenly into someone else’s conversation, though without losing that distant manner he had, as if just emerging from a deep sleep. It was about work. Which should be no more than a means of ending immediate hunger. And, amused at scandalizing the bystanders, he added—any day now he’d abandon his own, which he’d done several times before, to live like “a good bum.” A bespectacled student, after the first moment of silence and reticence that fell, coldly retorted that above all else work was a duty. “A duty in the interest of society.” Daniel made some gesture, as if he couldn’t be bothered to convince anyone, and granted one sentence:
    “Someone’s already declared there’s no foundation for duty.”
    He left the room, leaving the student fuming. And me, surprised and amused: I had never heard anyone defy work, “such a serious obligation.” Jaime and Papa’s greatest revolts manifested themselves in the form of some trivial complaint. In general, I’d never recalled that you ever could not accept, could choose, could revolt . . . Above all, I’d