And I returned to Paris.

II

It was another grey, chilly, late-February afternoon when I strolled down the Champs-Elysées in search of No. 202. Ahead of me walked the slightly bowed, hunched figure of a man who positively exuded elegance and a familiarity with the finer things of life – from the tips of his gleaming boots to the elegantly curved brim of his hat, beneath which one caught just a glimpse of rebellious curls. He was strolling along with his white-gloved hands behind his back and carrying a sturdy walking-stick topped with a glass knob. And only when he stopped at the door of No. 202 did I recognise the pointed nose and the long, silky moustache.

‘Jacinto!’

‘Zé Fernandes!’

We embraced so enthusiastically that my hat fell off into the mud. And as we went inside, both of us, overcome by emotion, kept murmuring:

‘Seven years!’

‘Seven years!’

And yet during those seven years, nothing had changed in the garden of No. 202! The same two neat, sandy paths surrounded the same circular lawn, as smooth and clean-swept as a carpet. In the middle of the lawn, a Corinthian vase waited to be filled, first with the tulips that would burst forth in April and then with the marguerites that would flower in June. And beside the steps, shielded by a glass awning, stood the two scrawny stone goddesses from the days of Jacinto’s grandfather, ‘Dom Galeão’, still holding aloft the same opaque-glass lamps in which the gas was already whistling.

Inside, however, in the hall, I was astonished to find that Jacinto had installed a lift, even though No. 202 only had two floors linked by a staircase so undemanding that it hadn’t even troubled Senhora Dona Angelina’s asthma! The spacious, carpeted lift offered numerous comforts during the seven-second journey: a divan, a bearskin rug, a street map of Paris, and a cabinet containing cigars and books. In the antechamber, where we disembarked, the temperature was as mild and warm as a May afternoon in Guiães. A servant – who paid as close attention to the thermometer as a pilot to the compass needle – was dexterously adjusting the heater’s golden vent. And among the palmtrees, as on some holy terrace in Benares, censers exhaled a beneficent vapour that perfumed and humidified the delicate, superfine air.

From the depths of my astonished self, I murmured:

‘This is Civilisation!’

Jacinto pushed open a door and we entered a majestic, shadowy temple which I only realised was a library when I bumped into a monstrous pile of new books. My friend brushed his finger lightly against the wall and a circle of electric lights, which glowed against the carved wooden ceiling, lit up the monumental ebony shelves. These were filled by over thirty thousand books – bound in white, scarlet and red, with just a few touches of gold – as stiff and erect in their pomp and authority as an assembly of learned doctors.

I could not contain my amazement.

‘What a storehouse, Jacinto!’

‘Well, one has to read …’

I noticed then that my friend had grown thinner, and that his nose, flanked by two deep lines, like those on the face of a weary actor, had grown more pointed. The locks of woolly hair tumbling over his brow were now sparser, and his brow itself had lost its look of serene polished marble. He was no longer curling his moustache, which drooped in pensive threads. I realised, too, that he had a slight stoop.

He lifted a tapestry curtain and we passed into his study – a most disturbing room. The sombre carpets were so thick that the sound of our footsteps vanished, along, it seemed to me, with reality itself. The damask wall-coverings, the divans, the woodwork, were all green, a dark laurel green. There were green silk shades on the electric lights, which were placed in such low, squat lamps that they looked like stars fallen onto the tables where they lay cooling and dying: only one shone out, naked and bright, atop a tall, square, slender set of shelves, as solitary as a tower or a melancholy beacon in the middle of a plain. A green lacquer screen, grass-green this time, covered the sea-green marble fireplace, in which the embers of some aromatic wood were slowly burning out.