Double

It was past five o'clock in the afternoon when Tertuliano Máximo Afonso got home. All that time wasted, he thought, as he opened the drawer where he had put the list and while he hesitated between Arm-in-arm with Fate and Angels Dance Too. He will never put either in the VCR, which is why he will never know that his double, the actor who looks just like him, as Maria da Paz might have said, plays a croupier in the first film and a dance teacher in the second. He suddenly rebelled against the self-imposed obligation to keep to the chronological order in which the films had been produced, from oldest all the way up to the most recent, he thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to vary things a bit, to break with routine, I'm going to watch The Goddess of the Stage, he said. Within ten minutes his double appeared, playing the part of a theater impresario. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso felt a jolt in the pit of his stomach, a lot of things must have changed in this actor's life for him to be playing a character who was gaining in importance all the time, after years of playing, fleetingly, a hotel receptionist, a bank clerk, a medical auxiliary, a nightclub doorman, and a police photographer. After half an hour, he couldn't stand it anymore, so he fast-forwarded the tape to the end, but, contrary to expectation, he failed to find in the credits any of the names on his list. He rewound back to the beginning, to the opening credits, which, out of force of habit, he had ignored, and there it was. The actor playing the part of the theater impresario in the film The Goddess of the Stage is called Daniel Santa-Clara.

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