What a face, murmured Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, when he looked at himself in the mirror, and he was quite right. He had slept for only an hour, having spent the rest of the night struggling with the shock and horror described above, possibly in excessive detail, an excess entirely forgivable perhaps, given that never before in the history of humanity, the same history that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso tries so hard to teach his students, have two identical people existed in the same place and at the same time. There have been instances in far-distant times of a perfect physical resemblance between two people, sometimes men, sometimes women, but they were always separated by tens and hundreds and thousands of years and by tens and hundreds and thousands of kilometers. The most remarkable case we know was that of a particular town, long since disappeared, in which in the same street and in the same house, but not in the same family, and separated by an interval of two hundred and fifty years, two identical women were born. This marvelous event was not recorded in any chronicle, nor was it preserved in the oral tradition, which is perfectly understandable, really, given that when the first was born, no one knew there would be a second, and when the second came into the world, all memory had been lost of the first. Naturally. Notwithstanding the complete absence of any documentary proof or of eyewitness accounts, we are able to confirm, and even swear on our word of honor if necessary, that everything we have described or will describe or might describe as having happened in that now disappeared town did actually happen. The fact that history does not record a fact doesn't mean the fact did not exist. When he had reached the end of his morning shaving ritual, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso dispassionately examined the face before him and thought that, all in all, he looked better. Indeed, any impartial observer, whether male or female, would not shrink from describing his features, taken as a whole, as harmonious, and would definitely not neglect to give due importance to certain slight asymmetries and certain subtle volumetric variations that, if we may put it like this, constituted the salt that enlivened what would otherwise be an entirely savorless delicacy, so often the curse of faces endowed with an overly regular physiognomy. Not that we're saying Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is the perfect figure of a man, he would never be so immodest and we would never be so subjective, but, with just a pinch of talent he could doubtless have had a successful career as a leading man in the theater. And, of course, if he could act in a theater, he could act in movies too. An unavoidable parenthesis. There are moments in a narrative, and this, as you will see, has been one of them, when any parallel manifestation of ideas and feelings on the part of the narrator with respect to what the characters themselves might be feeling or thinking at that point should be expressly forbidden by the laws of good writing. The violation, either out of imprudence or a lack of respect, of such restrictive clauses, which, if they existed, would probably be of a nonobligatory nature, can mean that a character, instead of following, as is his inalienable right, an autonomous line of thought and feeling in keeping with the status conferred upon him, finds himself assailed quite arbitrarily by thoughts or feelings that, given their provenance, cannot be entirely alien to him, but which can, nonetheless, prove, at the very least, inopportune and, in some cases, disastrous. This was precisely what happened to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso. He was looking at himself in the mirror the way someone looks at himself simply in order to gauge the damage done by a bad night's sleep, he was thinking about this and nothing else, when, suddenly, the narrator's unfortunate thoughts about his physical features and the problematic possibility that, should he reveal the necessary talent, they might, at some future date, be placed at the service of the dramatic or cinematic arts, unleashed in him a reaction that it would be no exaggeration to describe as one of horror. If the man who played the part of the clerk at the reception desk were here, he thought melodramatically, if he were standing here in front of this mirror, the face he would see would be this face. We cannot blame Tertuliano Máximo Afonso for forgetting that the other man was wearing a mustache in the film, he did forget, it's true, but perhaps only because he was absolutely certain that the other man wouldn't have a mustache now, which is why he has no need to resort to that mysterious source of knowledge, the presentiment, because he finds the best of all reasons in his own clean-shaven, utterly hairless face. Any feeling person will happily agree that the word horror, apparently ill suited to the domestic world of a person living alone, would describe with some accuracy what went through the mind of the man who has just come running back from his desk where he went to fetch a black felt-tipped pen and who now, standing once more before the mirror, traces on his own image, just above his own upper lip, a mustache identical to that worn by the clerk at the reception desk, the fine, pencil mustache of a leading man. At that moment, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso became the actor about whose name and life we know nothing, the teacher of history in a secondary school is no longer here, this apartment is not his, the face in the mirror has another owner. Had the situation lasted a minute longer, or not even that, anything could have happened in this bathroom, a nervous breakdown, a sudden fit of madness, a destructive rage. Fortunately, despite certain behavior which may have led one to believe the contrary, and which has doubtless not made its last appearance, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is made of sterner stuff, and having, for a few moments, lost control of the situation, he has now regained it. However great an effort it may take, we know that all it requires to escape from a nightmare is to open our eyes, but the cure in this case was to close the eyes, not his own, but those reflected in the mirror. As effectively as any wall, a squirt of shaving foam separated these Siamese twins who have not yet met, and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's right hand, splayed over the mirror, undid the faces of both men, so much so that neither would now be able to find or recognize himself in the surface smeared with white foam and with gradually thinning trickles of black. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso could no longer see the face in the mirror, now he was alone in the apartment. He got into the shower, and although he has always, since birth, been deeply skeptical about the Spartan virtues of cold water, his father used to say that there is no better way to prime the body or sharpen the brain, and so it occurred to him this morning that a good blast of cold water, without the addition of any decadent but delicious warmer water, might prove beneficial to his feeble head and might rouse once and for all the part inside him that is trying, all the time, surreptitiously, to slide into sleep. Washed and dried, hair combed without the aid of the mirror, he went into his bedroom, made the bed, got dressed, and then went straight to the kitchen to prepare a breakfast composed, as usual, of orange juice, toast, coffee, and yogurt, for teachers need to be well fed before they set off to school to face that most difficult of tasks, planting trees or even bushes of wisdom in ground that, in most cases, tends to be barren rather than fertile. It is still very early, his class will not start until eleven o'clock, but, in the circumstances, it is understandable that he would rather not be at home today. He returned to the bathroom to clean his teeth, and, while he was doing so, it occurred to him that today was the day his upstairs neighbor usually came to clean the apartment, she was an elderly woman, a widow with no children, who, as soon as she realized that her new neighbor also lived alone, had appeared at his door six years ago to offer her services as a cleaner. No, it's not her day today, he will leave the mirror as it is, the foam is already starting to dry, it comes off with the slightest touch of the fingers, but, for the moment, it's still sticking to the surface and he can see no one peeping out from underneath. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is ready to leave, he has already decided that he will go in the car in order to reflect calmly on the recent troubling events, without having to put up with the push and shove of public transport, which, for obvious economic reasons, it has been his habit to use. He put the homework books into his briefcase, paused for a few seconds to look at the empty video box, it would be a good time to follow the advice given by his common sense and take the video out of the VCR, put it back in its box, and go straight to the shop, Here you are, he would say to the assistant, I thought it would be interesting, but it wasn't, it was a waste of time, Do you want another one, the assistant would ask, struggling to recall the name of this customer who had only been in the day before, we've got a very wide selection, good films of every kind, old and new, ah, yes, Tertuliano, the last three words would only be thought, of course, and the accompanying ironic smile only imagined. Too late, the history teacher Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is already on his way down the stairs, this is not the first battle that common sense will have to resign itself to losing.