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IT WAS SATURDAY. NO ONE would dare say it, but the sun was gentler, the chickens walked more briskly on the streets, the pigeons made wider circles in the sky. The women were all carrying bags of bread and stopped to talk with one another. The men’s faces were all washed. Basking in the morning, the grass gladly waved. It was Saturday. Master Rafael had been at the blind prostitute’s house since the first colors of dawn. Salomão and the apprentice arrived at the hour when they usually began at the carpenter’s shop. It was the third and last Saturday they spent renovating the house. On the first Saturday, with three picks and three shovels, they dug a cesspool some twenty feet deep in the backyard, and by the time night arrived they had already made a cover so solid that the earth overlaying it would never cave in, even if they planted a ninety-year-old cork tree on top of it. On the second Saturday, they installed the toilet in a corner of the kitchen and connected the drainpipe to the cesspool. It was a lighter day of work, and Master Rafael, who hadn’t had time the week before to plot his ambitions, spent the day making plans. I’ll build a china cabinet to go here, I’ll make some shelves for over there. And at lunchtime, while they waited for the blind prostitute to arrive with three bowls of bread soup, each with a special treat of two grilled sardines, Master Rafael took the pencil from his ear, a small and thin sheet of wood from his pocket, and began to draw detailed plans for making the most of the area in the yard: lemon trees grafted into orange trees, apricot trees grafted into peach trees, grapevines, cabbages, flower beds with colorful patterns, lilies, mallows, and invented plants. Another show of his enthusiasm was when, at the end of the day, he asked his employees to wait in the yard while he tried out the toilet. Salomão and the apprentice stood there in silence, hands in their pockets, listening to the sounds in the kitchen, increased by the toilet’s flushing, and with greater attention they heard the water and filth passing through the drainpipe. Master Rafael, with his belt still unbuckled, jumped up and down on his crutch. The blind prostitute arrived right behind him with three glasses and a bottle of red wine. Now, on the third Saturday, they were going to install two windows, one in the bedroom wall next to the backyard, and another in the kitchen wall facing onto the street. They began with the bedroom window. Master Rafael measured it, outlined it with a pencil on the whitewash, and began to hammer out the wall with his one and only hand. The hammer had a handle the size of a man’s arm, and the hammer’s head was made of a special steel, with a special alloy that had been a generations-old secret but was forever lost when an identical hammer hit the head of the blacksmith’s youngest son, crushing it instantaneously. Even though the hammer was heavier than a woman, Master Rafael grabbed it by the tip of the handle, twirled it, and made it strike exactly where he wanted, with a bang that came from the depths of the earth or of men or of who knows what. In the yard the apprentice sifted spadefuls of sand, and with a hoe Salomão mixed the sand with cement and water into a coherent but not stiff mixture, soft but not runny. When Master Rafael had finished opening the hole, Salomão went to the toolbox to fetch a chisel and a carpenter’s hammer and made the oval hole into a rectangular shape. Even though the bed was covered with a drop cloth and plaster dust, the bedroom looked like a happy place for the first time; the light discovered its every nook, chasing out the gloom of many generations. The apprentice fetched the varnished window that Master Rafael had made on three late afternoons, and after driving large nails in crosswise around the edges, they began to secure it with trowels full of cement. Salomão, with hammer in hand, went to the kitchen to start the next window. Its shape was already outlined on the wall. Using both hands, Salomão slammed the hammer into the rectangular area, and the bricks didn’t budge, as the wall was very thick. On his second try, the first rubble gave way. A ray of sunlight shot through the wall. And Salomão, peeking through the hole, saw the devil on the other side. As if he’d known that Salomão was going to open a window there, as if he’d been waiting for him. The devil was on the street, a foot away from the wall, looking at him, smiling.