After all the doubts as to the most prudent way to tell his mother about the thorny problem of his absolute twin, or to use a more popular and somewhat vulgar expression, his spitting image, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was now reasonably convinced that he had managed to get around the difficulty without leaving behind him too many anxieties. He had been unable to prevent the subject of Maria da Paz from resurfacing, but he was surprised when he remembered something that had happened during the conversation, at the point where he had said that it would be best to finish the relationship once and for all, for, precisely at that moment, when he had uttered that apparently irremissible sentence, he had felt a kind of inner lassitude, a half-conscious longing for abdication, as if a voice in his head were trying to make him see that his obstinacy was nothing but the last redoubt behind which he was still struggling with a repressed desire to raise the white flag of unconditional surrender. If that's true, he thought, I'm under a strict obligation to reflect seriously on the matter, to analyze this fear and indecision that is probably just left over from my first marriage, and to resolve once and for all, for my own sake, what it means to care about a person so much that you want to live with her, because the truth is I didn't even think about it when I got married, and the same truth requires me to confess that, deep down, what frightens me is the possibility of failing again. These praiseworthy resolutions occupied Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's journey, alternating with fleeting images of António Claro, whom his thoughts, oddly enough, refused to represent as being as identical as he actually was, as if, against all the evidence of the facts, they were refusing to accept his existence. He also remembered fragments of the conversations he had had with him, especially the conversation in the house in the country, but with a strange sense of distance and indifference, as if none of it had anything to do with him, as if it were a story he had read once in a book of which all that remained were a few loose pages. He had promised his mother he would never meet António Claro again and so it would be, no one would be able to accuse him tomorrow of having taken a single step in that direction. His life is going to change. He will phone Maria da Paz as soon as he gets home. I should have called her while I was away, an unforgivable lack of consideration on my part, even if only to find out how her mother was, that was the very least I could have done, especially when she might well be about to become my mother-in-law. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso smiled at a prospect that, only twenty-four hours before, would have set his nerves jangling, the holiday has clearly been good for mind and body, it has clarified his ideas, he's a new man. He arrived in the late afternoon, parked the car outside the door of the apartment building, and then, nimble, lithe, and in the best of moods, as if he had not just driven more than four hundred kilometers nonstop, he walked up the stairs as lightly as an adolescent, not even noticing the weight of his suitcase, which, as is only natural, was heavier returning than it had been going, and he very nearly danced into his apartment. In accordance with the traditional conventions of the literary genre known in Portuguese as the