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love, she and I, many years before and that, one day, when I was already ill, I see her appear in the door of my bedroom.

VI
Chiméne, Qui L’eût Dit?
Rodrigue, Qui L’eût Cru?
     
    I see her appear in the door of my bedroom—pale, upset, dressed in black—and remain there for a minute without the courage to come in, or held back by the presence of the man who was with me. From the bed where I was lying I contemplated her all that time, neglecting to say anything to her or make any gesture. We hadn’t seen each other for two years and I saw her now not as she was but as she had been, as we both had been, because some mysterious Hezekiah had made the sun turn back to the days of our youth. The sun turned back, I shook off all my miseries, and this handful of dust that death was about to scatter into the eternity of nothingness was stronger than time, who is the minister of death. No water from Iuventus could match simple nostalgia in that.
    Believe me, remembering is the least evil. No one should trust present happiness, there’s a drop of Cain’s drivel in it. With the passing of time and the end of rapture, then, yes, then perhaps it’s possible really to enjoy, because between these two illusions the better one is the one that’s enjoyed without pain.
    The evocation didn’t last long. Reality took over immediately. The present expelled the past. Perhaps I’ll explain to the reader in some cornerof this book my theory of human editions. What matters now is that Virgília—her name was Virgília—entered the room with a firm step, with the gravity that her clothes and the years gave her, and came over to my bed. The outsider got up and left. He was a fellow who would visit me every day and talk about exchange rates, colonization, and the need for developing railroads, nothing of greater interest to a dying man. He left. Virgília stood there. For some time we remained looking at each other without uttering a word. What was there to say? Of two great lovers, two great passions, there was nothing left twenty years later. There were only two withered hearts devastated by life and glutted with it; I don’t know whether in equal doses, but glutted nonetheless. Virgília now had the beauty of age, an austere, maternal look. She was less thin than when I saw here the last time at a Saint John’s festival in Tijuca and, as she was someone who had a great deal of resistance, only now were a few silver threads beginning to mingle with her dark hair.
    “Are you making the rounds visiting dying men?” I asked her. “Come now, dying men!” Virgília answered with a pout. And then, after squeezing my hands, “I’m making the rounds to see if I can get lazy loafers back out onto the street.”
    It didn’t have the teary caress of other times, but her voice was friendly and sweet. She sat down. I was alone in the house except for a male nurse. We could talk to each other without any danger. Virgília gave me lots of news from the world outside, narrating it with humor, with a certain touch of a wicked tongue, which was the salt of her talk. I, ready to leave the world, felt a satanic pleasure in making fun of it all, in persuading myself that I wasn’t leaving anything worthwhile.
    “What kind of ideas are those?” Virgília interrupted me, a little annoyed. “Look, I’m not going to come back. Dying! We all have to die. It’s enough just being alive.”
    And looking at the clock:
    “Good heavens! It’s three o’clock. I’ve got to go.”
    “So soon?”
    “Yes. I’ll come back tomorrow or sometime later.”
    “I don’t know if you’re doing the proper thing,” I replied. “The patient is an old bachelor and the house has no women in it…”
    “What about your sister?”
    “She’s going to come and spend a few days here, but she can’t get here until Saturday.”
    Virgília thought for a moment, straightened up, and said gravely:
    “I’m an old woman! Nobody pays any attention to me anymore.