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eternal basis for crude jokes. One of us, Quincas Borba, was cruel to the poor man at that time. Two or three times a week he would put a dead roach into his pants pocket—wide trousers tied with a cord—or in the desk drawer, or by his inkwell. If he found it during school hours he would leap up, pass his flaming eyes over us, call us by our last names: we were parasites, ignoramuses, brats, scoundrels … Some trembled, others snorted. Quincas Borba, however, allowed himself to remain quiet, his eyes staring into space.
    A delight, Quincas Borba. Never in my childhood, never in my whole life did I find a funnier, more inventive, more mischievous boy. He was a delight not only in school but all over the city. His mother, a widow of certain means, worshiped her son and would bring him to school pampered, well dressed, all decked out, with a striking houseboy following, a houseboy who would let us play hooky, go hunt for birds’ nests or lizards on Livramento and Conceição hills, or simply roam the streets on the loose like two idle loafers. And as emperor! It was a pleasure to see Quincas Borba play the emperor during the festival of the Holy Spirit. In our children’s games he would always choose the role of king, minister, general, someone supreme, whoever he might be. The rascal had poise and gravity, a certain magnificence in his stance, in his walk. Who would have said that… Let’s hold back our pen, let’s not get ahead of events. Let’s take a leap to 1822, the date of our political independence and of my first personal captivity.

XIV
The First Kiss
     
    I was seventeen. My upper lip was beginning to sprout as I strove to grow a mustache. My eyes, lively and resolute, were my really masculine feature. Since I showed a certain haughtiness it was hard to tell whether I was a child with the arrogance of a man or a man with the look of a boy. In short, I was a handsome young fellow, handsome and bold, who was entering life in boots and spurs, a whip in his hand and blood in his veins, mounted on a nervous, robust, swift steed, like the steeds in ancient ballads, for whom romanticism went looking in medieval castles, only to run into him on the streets of our century. The worst is that the romantics wore the fellow out so much that it became necessary to lay him aside, where realism came to find him, eaten by leprosy and worms, and, out of compassion, they bore him off for their books.
    Yes, I was that handsome, graceful, well-to-do young fellow, and it’s easy to imagine how more than one lady lowered her pensive brow before me or lifted her covetous eyes up to me. Of them all, however, the one who captivated me immediately was a … a … I don’t know if I should say it. This book is chaste, at least in its intention. In its intention it is ever so chaste. But out with it, either you say everything or nothing. The one who captivated me was a Spanish woman, Marcela, “beautiful Marcela,” as the boys of those times called her. And the boys were right. She was the daughter of a gardener from Asturias. She told me so herself during a day of sincerity, because the accepted version was that she’d been born to a lawyer from Madrid, a victim of the French invasion, wounded, jailed, and shot when she was only twelve years old.
Cosas de España
. Whatever her father was, however, lawyer or gardener, the truth is that Marcela didn’t have any rustic innocence and hardly understood the morality of the law. She was a good girl, cheerful, without scruples, a little hampered by the austerity of the times, which wouldn’t allow her to haul her flightiness and her gossip games through the streets, fond of luxury, impatient, a friend of money and young men. That year she was madly in love with a certain Xavier, a wealthy and tubercular fellow—a pearl.
    I saw her for the first: time on the Rossio Grande, the night of fireworks celebrating the declaration of independence, a springtime festival, the dawn of the public