Then, fixing him with dark, thick-lashed eyes, he said:

‘Come now, Jacinto “Galeão”, what are you doing, rolling around in the road at this hour?’

And it was then that a stunned and grateful Jacinto recognised the Infante – Dom Miguel!

From that day forth, he loved the good Infante as – for all his gluttony and his devotion – he had never loved his dinner or his God! In the splendid hall of his house (in Calçada da Pampulha), he hung upon a damask wall the portrait of ‘his saviour’, adorned with palm leaves as if it were a retable, and displayed beneath it the walking stick which those same magnanimous royal hands had raised up from the dirt. While his adorable, beloved Infante languished in exile in Vienna, the paunchy gentleman rattled about Lisbon in his yellow carriage, bustling from Zé Maria’s bar in Belém to Plácido’s in Algibebes, bemoaning the fate and plotting the return of his ‘angel’. On that most blessed day when The Pearl appeared in the harbour, bearing the returned Messiah, Jacinto garlanded his house with flowers and erected a monument made out of cardboard and canvas in which Dom Miguel, transformed into St Michael, appeared all in white, with the halo and wings of an archangel, mounted on an Alter stallion and driving his spear into the Dragon of Liberalism, which, as it writhed in its death agony, was depicted vomiting up the Charter of 1826. During the war with ‘that pretender and freemason’, Dom Galeão sent muleteers to Santo Tirso and to São Gens, to provide the King with fine hams and sweetmeats, bottles of his own Tarrafal wine, and silk purses crammed with coins which he rubbed with soap to make the gold shine more brightly. And when Jacinto ‘Galeão’ learned that Dom Miguel, with only two battered old trunks and a mule, had set off along the road to Sines and his final exile, he ran through his house, shutting all the windows as if for a family funeral, and crying out angrily:

‘All right! Then I’m not staying here either!’

For he had no wish to remain in that perverse land which the plundered and banished King of Portugal – that picker-up of Jacintos – was now leaving. He embarked for France with his wife, Senhora Dona Angelina Fafes (of the famous Fafes da Avelã), his son, Jacintinho – a sallow, sickly child, sorely afflicted by pimples and boils – the nursemaid, and a black servant-boy. Off the Cantabrian coast, the ship met with such rough seas that Senhora Dona Angelina, kneeling on the bed in her cabin, her hair all dishevelled, prayed fervently to Our Lord of the Stations of the Cross in Alcântara, promising him a crown of thorns made of gold and adorned with drops of blood made of Pegu rubies. In Bayonne, where they put into harbour, Jacintinho fell ill with jaundice. Next, on a particularly wild night on the road to Orléans, the axle of their coach snapped, and the plump gentleman, the delicate lady from the house of Avelã and the boy had to trudge for three hours through the rain and mud of exile until finally they reached a village, where, after knocking like beggars at various silent doors, they ended up sleeping on tavern benches. And in the Hotel des Saints Pères in Paris, they had to endure a further horror: a fire broke out in the stables immediately underneath Jacinto’s room, and the worthy nobleman, stumbling down the stairs in his nightshirt to the courtyard, stepped with his bare foot on a sliver of glass. Bitterly shaking one hairy fist at the heavens, he roared:

‘Enough is enough!’

That same week, without looking any further, Jacinto ‘Galeão’ bought the palatial residence at No. 202 Champs-Elysées from a Polish prince, who, after the fall of Warsaw, had chosen to become a Carthusian monk. And beneath the lavish gold of No. 202’s stucco ceilings and amid its sprigged silks, Dom Galeão took refuge from all these vicissitudes in a life of utter idleness and good food, in the company of a few fellow emigrés (Judge Nuno Velho, the Count de Rabacena, and other minor figures), until, one day, he died of indigestion brought on by a dish of pickled lamprey sent to him by his agent in Montemor. Their friends assumed that Senhora Dona Angelina Fafes would return at once to Portugal; the good lady, however, feared the journey, the sea, and those carriage axles all too prone to snap. Nor did she wish to leave her confessor or her doctor, who understood her scruples and her asthma so very well.

‘Much as I miss the good water of Alcolena, I’m going to stay here in No. 202,’ she declared. ‘I’ll leave it to Jacintinho to decide what to do once he’s grown up.’

Jacintinho had grown up. Thinner and paler than a wax candle, he was a silent, lank-haired, large-nosed youth permanently bundled up in baggy black clothes a size or so too large for him. At night, unable to sleep for coughing and choking, he would wander the rooms of No. 202 in his nightshirt, carrying a candle; the servants always referred to him as ‘The Shadow’. When the period of mourning for his father came to an end, there surfaced in his silent, hesitant soul an intense desire to take up wood-turning; then, somewhat later, in the sweet flower of his twentieth year, another entirely different sentiment sprang up in him: one of love and admiration for Judge Velho’s daughter – round and plump as a pigeon – who had been brought up in a convent in Paris and was a girl of many talents, for she could enamel and gild, mend clocks and make felt hats. In the autumn of 1851, when the chestnut trees in the Champs-Elysées were already beginning to lose their leaves, Jacintinho began to cough blood. The doctor, stroking his chin and furrowing his vast brow, advised the lad to set off at once for Golfe Juan or for the warm sands of Arcachon.

Jacintinho, however, tenacious as a shadow, could not bear to leave Teresina Velho, after whom he did, indeed, trail across Paris like a slow, silent shade. Then, shadow-like, he married, turned a few more pieces of wood, spat up a little more blood, and passed on – like the shadow he was.

Three months and three days after his funeral, my Jacinto was born.

His grandmother scattered fennel and amber over his cradle to ward off bad luck, and Jacinto grew with all the confidence, vigour and sap of a pine tree growing in the dunes.

He caught neither measles nor worms.