around his feet. She always was more confident than me, he thought, and at that moment he saw the reasons for his defeat quite differently, who was this grotesque figure, disheveled and unshaven, in down-at-the-heels slippers, the stripes on his pajama bottoms like faded fringes peeping out from beneath his dressing gown, which has been tied clumsily so that one edge is higher than the other, there are some decisions in life that must be taken only when dressed to the nines, with one's tie knotted and one's shoes polished, so that one can exclaim in noble, wounded tones, If my presence bothers you, madam, say not another word, then sweep out of the door, without looking back, looking back brings with it terrible risks, a person can be turned into a pillar of salt at the mercy of the first shower of rain. But Tertuliano Maximo Afonso now has another problem to solve, one that requires great tact, great diplomacy, a talent for maneuvering which has so far eluded him, especially since, as we have seen, the initiative always lay in Maria da Paz's hands, even right at the start, when she arrived and threw herself into her lover's arms like a woman about to drown. This was precisely what Tertuliano Maximo Afonso thought, caught between admiration, annoyance, and a kind of dangerous tenderness, She looked as if she were about to drown, but she actually had her feet firmly on the ground. Returning to the problem, what Tertuliano Maximo Afonso cannot allow is for Maria da Paz to be left alone in the living room. What if she appears with the coffee, and, by the way, why is she taking so long, coffee takes only a few minutes to make, gone are the days when you had to strain it, what if, after drinking their coffee in sweet harmony, she says to him, either with or without ulterior motives, You go and get dressed while I have a look at one of these videos of yours, to see if I can spot any of your famous ideological signals, what if cruel fate were to make Tertuliano Maximo Afonso's double appear in the role of nightclub doorman or bank clerk, imagine Maria da Paz's scream, Maximo, Maximo, come here, quick, come and see this actor playing a medical auxiliary and who looks just like you, really, you can call him anything you like, good Samaritan, divine Providence, brother of charity, but he's certainly no ideological signal. None of this, however, will happen, Maria da Paz will bring in the coffee, you can hear her coming down the corridor now, the tray with two cups and a sugar bowl on it, a few biscuits to placate the stomach, and everything will pass off as Tertuliano Maximo Afonso would never have dared to dream, they drank their coffee in silence, but it was a companionable silence, not hostile, the perfect domestic bliss that, as far as Tertuliano Maximo Afonso was concerned, turned into utter heaven when he heard her say, While you're getting dressed, I'll sort out the chaos in the kitchen, then I'll leave you in peace to get on with your work, Oh, don't let's talk any more about that, said Tertuliano Maximo Afonso in order to remove this importunate stone from the middle of the road, but aware that he had just put another stone there in its place, more difficult to remove, as he will soon find out. In any case, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso did not want to leave anything to chance, he shaved in a trice, washed in a twinkling, got dressed in a flash, did all this, in short, so rapidly that when he went into the kitchen, he was still in plenty of time to dry the dishes. The most touchingly familiar of all scenes then took place in this apartment, the man drying the plates and the woman putting them away, it could have been the other way around, but destiny or fate, call it what you will, decided that it should be thus so that what had to happen happened as Maria da Paz was reaching up to place a serving dish on a shelf, thus, either wittingly or unwittingly, offering up her slender waist to the hands of a man incapable of resisting the temptation. Tertuliano Maximo Afonso put down the tea towel, and while the cup, slipping from his grasp, shattered on the floor, he embraced Maria da Paz, clasped her furiously to him, and the most objective and impartial of spectators would readily have admitted that his so-called first flush of enthusiasm could never have been greater than this. The question, the painful and eternal question, is how long will this last, will this really mean a rekindling of an affection that will have occasionally been confused with love, with passion even, or do we merely find ourselves once more before the familiar phenomenon of the candle that, as it goes out, burns with a higher and unbearably brighter flame, unbearable only because it is the last, not because it is rejected by our eyes, which would happily remain absorbed in looking. It is said and has been said before that between the lashes the back takes its pleasure, but it is not the back, in fact, that is taking its pleasure, indeed we would go so far as to say, if we can allow ourselves to be so crude, that it is, rather, the lash that is taking its pleasure, however, the truth is, although this is not the moment for high-flown lyricism, that the joy, pleasure, and delight of these two people stretched out on the bed, one on top of the other, arms and legs literally entwined, should prompt us respectfully to doff our hat and hope that it will be always thus for them, or for each of them, whoever their future partners might be, if, that is, the candle that is burning now does not last beyond this brief, final spasm, the very spasm that, even as it melts us, also hardens and drives us apart. Bodies, thoughts. Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is thinking about life's contradictions, about the fact that in order to win a battle it might sometimes be necessary to lose it, the present situation is a case in point, to win would have been to guide the conversation in the direction of the desired total and definitive split, and that battle, at least for the time being, had to be given up as lost, but to win would also be to distract Maria da Paz's attention from the videos and the imaginary study on ideological signals, and that battle has, for the moment, been won. According to popular wisdom, you can't have everything, and there's a good deal of truth in that, the balance of human lives is constantly swinging back and forth between what is gained and what is lost, the problem lies in the equally human impossibility of coming to an agreement on the relative merits of what should be lost and what should be gained, which is why the world is in the state it's in. Maria da Paz is also thinking, but, being a woman, and therefore closer to things fundamental and essential, she is remembering her anxiety of mind when she entered the apartment, her certainty that she would leave here vanquished and humiliated, and yet, after all, the one thing that she had never for a moment imagined would happen has happened, going to bed with the man she loves, which just goes to show how much this woman still has to learn if she does not know that it is in bed that so many dramatic arguments between couples end up and are resolved, not because having sex is a panacea for all physical and moral ills, although there are plenty of people who think it is, but because, when bodies are exhausted, minds take the opportunity to raise a timid finger and ask permission to enter, ask if their reasons can be heard now and if they, the bodies, are prepared to listen. That is when the man says to the woman, or the woman to the man, We must be mad, what fools we've been, and one of them, out of compassion, does not respond as in fairness they could, Well, you might have been, but I've been here all the time. Impossible though it may seem, it is this silence full of unspoken words that saves what had been judged to be lost, like a raft that looms out of the fog looking for its sailors, with its oars and its compass, with its candle and its cache of bread. Tertuliano Maximo Afonso said, We could have lunch together, if you're free that is, Of course I am, I always have been, No, what I meant was that there's your mother to be considered, Oh, I told her I fancied going for a walk alone and that I might not be home for lunch, An excuse to come here, Not exactly, it was only after I'd left the house that I decided to come and speak to you, And now we've spoken, Meaning, asked Maria da Paz, that everything between us will continue as before, Of course. One might have expected a little more eloquence from Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, but he will always be able to say, I didn't have time, she flung her arms around my neck and kissed me and I did the same, and, God help us, there we were once more entwined, And did God help, asked the unknown voice that we haven't heard for a while now, Well, I don't know if it was God exactly, but it was certainly good, So what next, We're going to have lunch, And you're not going to talk about it, About what, About you and her, We've talked, No, you haven't, Yes, we have, So the clouds have all blown away, They have, Does that mean you're no longer considering ending the relationship, then, That's another matter, let's leave for tomorrow what belongs to the morrow, A good philosophy, The best, As long as you know what does belong to the morrow, We can't know that until we get there, You've got an answer for everything, You would too if you had had to lie as much as I have in the last few days, So, you're going out to lunch, Yes, we are, Well,
It was past five o'clock in the afternoon when Tertuliano Maximo 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
