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waiter in a restaurant with a switchblade just to steal a roast chicken. One day, when he had an abscess on his leg, he coldly scraped it with a knife and in view of everybody squeezed it, laughing. Many in the gang didn’t like him but those who looked the other way and became his friends said he was “a good egg.” Deep down in his heart he was sorry for the bad luck they all had. And laughing and ridiculing was the way he ran away from his own bad luck. He was like a remedy. He stood still, watchingLollipop as he concentrated on his prayers. On the face of the praying boy an exaltation could be seen, something that Legless thought was joy or happiness at first. But he looked closely at the other’s face and saw that it was an expression he couldn’t define. And he thought, contracting his little face, that maybe that’s why he’d never thought about praying, turning toward the heaven that Father José Pedro spoke about so much when he came to see them. What he wanted was happiness, joy, fleeing from all the misery that surrounded and smothered them. There was, it’s true, the wide freedom of the streets. But there was also the loss of all love, the lack of any kind words. Lollipop was seeking that in heaven, in the pictures of saints, in the withered flowers he brought for Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows the way a romantic lover in chic neighborhoods brings a proposal of marriage to the one he loves. But Legless didn’t see how that could be enough. He wanted something immediate, something that would make his face smiling and gay, that would free him from the need to laugh at everybody and everything. That would also free him from the anguish, that urge to weep that came over him on winter nights. He didn’t want what Lollipop had: a face full of exaltation. He wanted joy, a hand that would caress him lovingly, someone, who with a lot of love, could make him forget his physical defect and the many years (maybe they’d only been months or weeks, but for him they would always be long years) he had lived alone on the streets of the city, antagonized by the men who passed, shoved by guards, beaten up by older urchins. He’d never had a family. He’d lived in the house of a baker whom he called “my godfather” and who beat him. He ran away as soon as he was able to understand that running away would set him free. He went hungry, one day he was arrested. He wants loving, a hand that will pass over his eyes and make him be able to forget that night in jail when drunken policemen made him run around a holding room on his lame leg. In each corner there was one with a long piece of rubber hose. The marks left on his back had disappeared. But inside him the pain of that hour had never gone. He’d run around the room like an animal pursued by other stronger ones. His lame leg refused to help him.And the rubber hose slapped on his back when fatigue made him stop. At first he wept a lot, then, he doesn’t know why, the tears dried up. After a time he couldn’t take any more, fell to the floor. He was bleeding and even today he can still hear the policemen laughing and how that fat man in a gray vest and smoking a cigar laughed. Then he found the Captains of the Sands (it was the Professor who brought him, they’d made friends on a park bench) and he stayed with them. It didn’t take him long to make his mark because he, better than anyone, knew how to put on great pain and in that way trick ladies whose houses would be visited later by the gang, who already knew all the places where there were objects of value and all the habits of the house. And Legless had great satisfaction when he thought about how those ladies who had taken him for a poor orphan were cursing him. That was how he got his revenge, because his heart was full of hate. In a confused way he wanted to have a bomb (like one of those in a certain story the Professor told) that would wipe out the whole city and blow everybody into the air. In that way he