Double

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso did not sleep. He had to leave that apartment quickly, he couldn't risk António Claro coming home earlier than he had said, before midday had been his actual words, what if things at the house in the country had not gone as he expected and he was already racing back here, angry with himself, eager to bury his frustration in the peace of his own home, where he will tell his wife about his work, inventing, to justify his bad mood, setbacks that did not exist, arguments that did not take place, agreements that were not made. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's difficulty lies in not being able to leave just like that, he has to give Helena an excuse that will not arouse her distrust, remember that up until now she has had no reason to think that the man with whom she slept and took pleasure last night is not her husband, and where is he going to find the nerve to tell her now, having concealed the information until the last moment, that he has urgent business to deal with on a morning like this, a summer Saturday, when the logical thing, bearing in mind the sublime heights of harmony reached by this couple, and to which we were witness, would be to stay in bed to continue their interrupted conversation, along with anything more interesting that might occur. Helena will soon appear with the breakfast, it's been such an age since they had breakfast together like this, in the intimacy of a bed still redolent of love's particular fragrances, that it would be unforgivable to waste an opportunity that, in all probability, at least all the probabilities we know about, is clearly conspiring to be the last. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso thinks and thinks and thinks, and, as he thinks and thinks, because what we would term the paradoxical energy of the human soul can reach such extremes, the need to leave grows fainter and fainter, less urgent, and, at the same time, imprudently brushing aside all foreseeable risks, a wild desire to be an eyewitness to his definitive triumph over António Claro is growing in strength inside him. To be there in the flesh and prepared to face whatever the consequences might be. Let him come and find him here, let him rant, let him rage, let him use violence, whatever he does, nothing will be able to lessen the extent of his defeat. He knows that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso wields the ultimate weapon, it will be enough for that thousand-times-cursed history teacher to ask him where he has been and for Helena, finally, to know the sordid side of the prodigious ad venture of these two men identical down to the moles on their arms, the scars on their knees, and the size of their penises, and from this day forward, identical too in their couplings. An ambulance may have to come and collect Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's battered body, but his aggressor's wound, that will never heal. These base thoughts of revenge produced by the brain of this man lying in bed waiting for his breakfast might have gone no further, were it not for the aforementioned paradoxical energy of the human soul, or, to give it another name, the possible emergence of feelings of an unusual nobility, of a gentlemanly nature all-the-more-worthy of applause given their otherwise entirely deplorable personal antecedents. Incredible though it may seem, the man who, out of moral cowardice, out of fear that the truth would be revealed, allowed Maria da Paz to fall into the arms of António Claro, is the same man who not only is prepared to carry out the most difficult task of his entire life, but has also realized that it is his strict duty not to leave Helena alone in the delicate situation of having one husband by her side and seeing another walk in through the front door. The human soul is a box out of which a clown is always ready to spring, making faces and sticking out his tongue, but there are times when that same clown merely peers at us over the edge of the box, and if he sees that, by chance, we are behaving in a just and honest fashion, he merely nods approvingly and disappears, thinking that we are not yet an entirely lost cause. Thanks to the decision he has just made, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has removed from his record a few of his minor faults, but he will have to suffer greatly before the ink in which the others were written begins to fade from the brown paper of memory. People often say, Let time do its work, but what we always forget to ask is if there will ever be enough time. Helena came in carrying the breakfast just as Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was getting up, Don't you want to have breakfast in bed, she asked, and he said no, he would prefer to be seated comfortably on a chair rather than constantly having to keep one eye cocked for the slithering tray, the sliding cup, the smears left behind by the melting butter, and the crumbs that creep into the folds of the sheets and always end up in the skin's most delicate crevices. He tried to make this speech sound as comical and good-humored as he could, but its sole objective was to disguise Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's new and pressing preoccupation, which is this, that if António Claro does turn up, at least he won't find us in the marriage bed nibbling sinfully on scones and toast, that if António Claro does turn up, at least he will find his bed made and his room aired, that if Antonio Claro does turn up, at least he will find us properly washed, combed, and dressed, because as with appearances so it is with vice, since we're walking hand in hand with it, and there seems no way of avoiding this or any real advantage in doing so, we might as well make vice pay occasional homage to virtue, even if only in form, besides, it's highly unlikely it would be worth asking any more of it than that.