Caetano liked women, all women. He could be aroused by the merest twitch of a skirt. He felt an irresistible attraction for women of easy virtue. Vice, dissolution, love for sale, all fascinated him. He knew most of the city’s brothels, knew the price list by heart, could tell you off the top of his head (or so he boasted to himself) the names of a good few dozen women he had slept with.
Only one woman despised him: his own wife. As far as he was concerned, Justina was a totally asexual creature, with no needs and no desires. If he happened to touch her while they were in bed together, he would recoil in disgust, repelled by her hard, thin body, her dry, almost parchment-like skin. “She’s not a woman, she’s a bag of bones,” he would think.
Justina saw the disgust in his eyes and said nothing. The flame of desire had long since burned out in her. She reciprocated her husband’s contempt with her own still more boundless contempt. She knew he was unfaithful to her and frankly didn’t care, but what she would not tolerate was having him boast about his conquests at home. Not because she was jealous, but because, aware of how far she had fallen in marrying a man like him, she preferred not to descend to his level. And when Caetano, carried away by his naturally loud, irascible temperament, abused her verbally or compared her with other women, she could silence him with just a few words. To someone of Caetano’s Don Juanesque character, those words constituted a humiliation, a reminder of a failure that still burned in his flesh and in his mind. Whenever he heard them, he was tempted to attack his wife physically, but at such moments, Justina’s eyes blazed with a fierce fire, her mouth curled into a sneer, and he shrank back.
That’s why, when they were together, silence was the rule and words the exception. That’s why only icy sentiments and indifference filled the vacuum of the hours they spent together. The mustiness that permeated the apartment, its whole subterranean atmosphere, was redolent of an abandoned tomb.
Tuesday was Caetano’s day off. This meant he didn’t need to arrive home until late morning; he would sleep until the afternoon and only then have lunch. Maybe it was that late lunch, or possibly the prospect of spending the night in bed beside his wife, but Tuesdays were the days when Caetano’s ill humor was most likely to surface, however hard he tried to suppress it. On those days, Justina’s reserve became still more marked and seemed to double in thickness. Accustomed to the insuperable distance between them, Caetano could never understand why it should become even greater. In revenge, he would exaggerate the crudeness of his words and gestures, the brusqueness of his movements. What particularly annoyed him was the fact that his wife always chose Tuesday as the day on which to air their dead daughter’s clothes and carefully polish the glass on her eternally smiling photo. He felt this ceremony was intended as a criticism of him, and though he was sure that, in this respect at least, he did not deserve any criticism, he nevertheless found that weekly parading of memories deeply troubling.
Tuesdays were unhappy days in the Caetano Cunha household, nervous, edgy days when Justina, if pried out of her usual state of abstraction, would turn violent and aggressive. Days when Caetano was afraid to open his mouth because every word seemed charged with electricity. Days on which some evil little devil seemed to take pleasure in making the atmosphere in their apartment unbreathable.
The clouds that had covered the sky the previous night had cleared away. The sun poured in through the glass canopy over the enclosed balcony at the back, its iron struts casting a shadow on the floor like prison bars. Caetano had just had his lunch. He looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly four. He lumbered to his feet. He was in the habit of sleeping without his pajama bottoms on. His large abdomen strained at the buttons of his loose pajama jacket, giving him a striking resemblance to one of those plump, doll-like figures created by Rafael Bordalo. While his swollen belly might be laughable, his flushed, scowling face could not have been more unpleasant. Oblivious to both these things, he left the bedroom, walked through the kitchen, without saying a word to his wife, and went into the bathroom. He opened the window and looked up at the sky. The intense light made him blink like an owl. He gazed indifferently out at the neighboring back yards, at three cats playing on one of the roofs, and didn’t even notice the pure, supple flight of a passing swallow.
Then his eyes fixed on a point much closer to home. In the neighboring window, that of Lídia’s bathroom, he could see the sleeve of a pink dressing gown moving about. Now and then, the sleeve fell back to reveal a bare forearm. Leaning on the windowsill, with the lower part of his body hidden, Caetano could not take his eyes off her window. He could see very little, but what he saw was still enough to excite him. He leaned farther out and met the ironic gaze of his wife, watching him from the balcony. His face hardened. Then suddenly she was there before him, handing him a coffeepot.
“Here’s your hot water.”
He didn’t thank her, he merely closed the bathroom door again. While he was shaving, he kept peering across at Lídia’s window. The sleeve had disappeared. In its place, Caetano found his wife’s eyes staring at him. He knew that the best way to avoid the imminent storm was to stop looking, which would be easy enough given that Lídia was no longer there. However, temptation won out over prudence. At one point, exasperated by his wife’s spying, he opened the door and said:
“Haven’t you got anything better to do?”
They never addressed each other by their first names. She looked at him without answering and, still without answering, turned her back on him. Caetano slammed the door and did not look out of the window again. When he emerged, washed and shaved, he noticed that his wife had taken from a suitcase that she kept in the kitchen the diminutive items of clothing that had once belonged to Matilde. Were it not for the adoring look she bestowed on the clothes, Caetano might have passed by without a word, but yet again, he felt she was criticizing him.
“When are you going to stop spying on me?”
Justina took her time before replying. She seemed to be returning very slowly from somewhere far away, from a distant land with only one inhabitant.
“I was admiring your persistence,” she said coldly.
“What do you mean ‘persistence’?” he asked, taking a step forward.
He looked utterly ridiculous in his underpants, his legs bare. Justina eyed him sarcastically. She knew that she was ugly and unattractive, but seeing her husband like that, she felt like laughing in his face:
“Do you really want me to tell you?”
“Yes.”
From that moment on, Caetano was lost. Before he said that word, there had still been time to avoid receiving the inevitable slap in the face, but he had said yes and was already regretting it. Too late.
“You still haven’t lost hope, then? You still think she’ll fall into your arms one day, do you? Aren’t you embarrassed by what happened?”
Caetano’s chin was trembling with rage. Saliva appeared at the corners of his thick lips.
“Do you want her lover to come and rip you to shreds again for overstepping the mark?”
And in a tone of ironic concern, as if she were giving him a piece of advice, she said:
“Have a little self-respect. She’s far too classy a piece for you to lay hands on. Make do with the other women, the ones whose photos you carry around in your wallet. I can’t say I care for your taste. I suppose when they have their mug shots taken they give you a copy, is that right? You’re a sort of branch office of the police, aren’t you?”
Caetano turned deathly pale. His wife had never gone so far before. He clenched his fists and took a step toward her: