It's getting late, it's gone half past ten. Helena has left to do some shopping, she said, Bye, and gave him a kiss, a warm and still consoling remnant of the bonfire of passion that had, in recent hours, illicitly joined and inflamed this man and this woman. Now, sitting on the sofa, with the book about ancient Mesopotamian civilizations open on his lap, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is waiting for Antonio Claro to arrive, and, being someone whose imagination frequently throws off the fetters, he imagined that the said António Claro and his wife might have met in the street and come up the stairs to sort out this tangle once and for all, Helena protesting, You're not my husband, my husband's at home, that's him sitting over there, you're the history teacher who has been trying to ruin our lives, and António Claro assuring her, No, I'm your husband, he's the history teacher, look at the book he's reading, he's the biggest impostor in the world he is, and she, cutting and ironic, Oh, yes, so perhaps you can explain why it is that he's the one wearing the wedding ring and not you. Helena has just come back alone with the shopping and it's now eleven o'clock. In a while, she will ask, Are you worried about something, and he'll deny it, No, whatever gave you that idea, and she'll say, Well, in that case, I don't understand why you keep looking at the clock, and he will reply that he doesn't know why either, it's just a tic, perhaps he's nervous about something, If they gave me the role of King Hammurabi, my career as an actor would really take off. Half past eleven came, a quarter to twelve, and still no António Claro. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's heart is like a furious horse dealing kicks in every direction, panic tightens his throat and screams at him that there's still time, Look, while she's in the other room, seize your opportunity and make your escape, you've still got nearly ten minutes, but be careful, don't use the lift, take the stairs and look both ways before you set foot in the street. It's midday, the clock in the living room slowly counted out the beats as if wanting to give António Claro one last chance to appear, to keep his promise, even if he did so only at the very last second, although there's no point in Tertuliano Máximo Afonso trying to deceive himself, If he hasn't come now, he won't be coming at all. Anyone can be late, the car can break down, you can get a puncture, these are things that happen every day and from which no one is exempt. From now on, every minute will be an agony, then it will be the turn of puzzlement, perplexity, and, inevitably, the thought, All right, he's been delayed, seriously delayed, but what are phones for, why doesn't he phone to say that the differential has broken, or the gearbox, or the fan belt, which are all things that can happen to a worn-out old car like his. Another hour passed and not a sign of António Claro, and when Helena came to announce that lunch was on the table, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso said he wasn't hungry, she should eat alone, and, anyway, he needed to go out. She wanted to know why, and he could have retorted that they weren't married and that he was therefore under no obligation to tell her what he was or wasn't going to do, but the moment to place all his cards on the table and begin to play fairly had not yet arrived, and so he merely said that he would explain everything later, a promise that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso always has on the tip of his tongue and which he keeps, when he does keep it, only partially and late, ask his mother, ask Maria da Paz, from whom we also have no news. Helena asked if he thought perhaps he should change his clothes, and he said yes, what he was wearing really wasn't suitable for what he had to do, a suit, jacket, and trousers would be more appropriate, after all, I'm not a tourist and I'm not off to spend the summer in the country. Fifteen minutes later, he left, Helena accompanied him to the lift, in her eyes was the warning glimmer of tears to come, and before Tertuliano Máximo Afonso had even had time to reach the street, she was sobbing, repeating over and over that question as yet unanswered, What's wrong, what's wrong.
As Tertuliano Máximo Afonso climbed into the car, his first thought was to get away from there, to go and park in some quiet spot where he could reflect seriously on the situation, impose order on the confusion that has been jostling about in his mind for the last twenty-four hours, and decide what to do. He started the engine and only had to turn the corner to understand that he did not need to reflect at all, all he had to do was phone Maria da Paz, why on earth didn't I think of it before, presumably because I was shut up in that apartment and therefore unable to make a phone call. A couple hundred meters farther on he found a telephone booth. He stopped the car, hurriedly entered the booth, and dialed the number. It was suffocatingly hot inside. The female voice at the other end asking, Who is it, was not her familiar voice, I wanted to speak to Maria da Paz, he said, Yes, but who is it, I'm a colleague of hers, from the bank where she works, Maria da Paz is dead, she died this morning in a car accident, she was with her fiancé and they both died, it's a tragedy, a real tragedy. In an instant, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's whole body, from head to toe, was bathed in sweat. He babbled some words the woman could not understand, What did you say, yes, what had he said, a few words that he no longer remembers or ever will remember, that he has forgotten forever, and, without realizing what he was doing, like an automaton whose power supply has suddenly been turned off, he dropped the receiver. Standing utterly still inside the furnace of the telephone booth, he could hear one word, just one, echoing in his ears, Dead, but other words soon came to take its place, and these screamed, You killed her. António Claro didn't kill her with his reckless driving, always supposing that was the cause of the accident, he, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, killed her, his moral weakness killed her, the will that made him blind to everything but revenge killed her, it was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique. They say you can hate someone only if you hate yourself, but the worst of all hatreds must be the hatred that cannot bear another person to be the same, worse still if that sameness should ever become total. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso staggered like a drunkard out of the booth, got into the car as if he were hurling himself inside, and sat there, staring blankly ahead, until he could stand it no longer and tears and sobs shook his chest. At this moment, he loves Maria da Paz as he had never loved her nor ever would love her in the future. The grief he feels is for her newborn absence, but an awareness of his guilt is creating a suppurating wound that will secrete pus and filth forever after. Some people looked at him with the gratuitous, impotent curiosity that does neither good nor ill in the world, but one person did come over and ask if he could help in any way, but he said no, thank you, and, having thanked him, wept still more bitterly, it was as if someone had come and placed a hand on his shoulder and said, Be patient, in time your sorrow will pass, it's true, in time everything does pass, but there are cases when time takes time to let the grief abate, and there have been and will be cases, fortunately few, in which the grief never abated and time did not pass. He sat on like this until he had no more tears to shed, until time decided to start moving again and to ask, And now what, where will you go, and it was then that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, in all probability transformed into António Claro for the rest of his life, realized that he had nowhere to go. In the first place, the apartment he used to call his own belonged to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is dead, in the second place, he can't drive from here to the apartment that was António Claro's and tell Helena that her husband is dead because, as far as she is concerned, he is Antonio Claro, and finally, there is Maria da Paz's apartment, to which he had never even been invited, he could go there only to offer his useless sympathies to a poor mother bereft of her daughter. The natural thing at this point would be for Tertuliano Máximo Afonso to think of another mother, who, already informed of the sad news, will likewise be weeping the inconsolable tears of maternal orphanhood, but the unshakable consciousness that, as far as he is concerned, he is and always will be Tertuliano Máximo Afonso and that he is, therefore, alive, must have temporarily blocked out what, in other circumstances, would certainly have been his first impulse. Meanwhile, he will still have to find an answer to the question that has been left hanging, And now what, where will you go, one of the easier difficulties to resolve in any city, whether a vast metropolis like this or not, with hotels and boardinghouses to suit all tastes and purses. That is where he will have to go, and not just for a few hours to find shelter from the heat and to be free to weep. It was one thing to have spent the previous night with Helena, when doing so was just a move in the game, if you're going to sleep with my wife, then I'll sleep with yours, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, as demanded by the law of talion, never applied more appropriately than in this case, for our present-day word "identical" means the same as the Latin etymon