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would be happy. Maybe he would be too if he saw someone, possibly a woman with gray hair and soft hands, who would hug him against her breast, would stroke his face and make him sleep a good sleep, a sleep that wouldn’t be full of dreams of that night in jail. He would be happy that way, there wouldn’t be any more hate in his heart. And he wouldn’t have any more disdain, envy, or hatred for Lollipop, who with his hands raised and his eyes staring, flees his world of suffering for a world he learned about talking to Father José Pedro.
    A sound of conversation draws closer. A group of four is coming into the silence that now reigns in the warehouse night. Legless shakes himself, laughs behind the back of Lollipop who goes on praying. He shrugs his shoulders, decides to leave the working out of details of the theft of the hats for tomorrow morning. And since he’s afraid of sleep, he goes over to greet the group coming in, asking for a cigarette, joking about the adventures with women the four are telling about:
    “A bunch of squirts like you? Who’s going to believe that you’recapable of mounting a woman? It must have been some faggot dressed up as a girl.”
    The others are annoyed:
    “You like to mess around too. If you want to, all you’ve got to do is come with us tomorrow. That way you can get to know the broad, she’s stacked.”
    Legless laughs sardonically:
    “I don’t like fairies.”
    And he goes off walking through the warehouse.
    Cat still hasn’t gone to sleep. He always goes out after eleven o’clock. He’s the dandy of the group. When he arrived, pale and pink, Good-Life tried to get him. But way back then Cat already had an unbelievable agility and hadn’t come as Good-Life had thought from a family home. He came from the midst of the Street Indians, children who live under the bridges in Aracaju. He’d made the trip on the tail-end of a train. He was quite familiar with the life of abandoned children. And he was over thirteen already. So he knew right off the motives of Good-Life, a stocky, ugly mulatto, why he treated him so nicely. He offered him cigarettes and gave him part of his dinner and ran through the city with him. After they’d snatched a pair of new shoes displayed by the door of a shop on the Baixa dos Sapateiros together, Good-Life had said:
    “Let me have them, I know where we can sell them.”
    Cat looked at his own dusty shoes:
    “I was thinking of using them myself. I need a pair…”
    “You with such a good pair on you…?” Good-Life was surprised. He rarely wore shoes and was barefoot at the time.
    “I’ll pay you your share. How much do you think it is?”
    Good-Life looked at him. Cat was wearing a necktie, a patched jacket, and amazingly was wearing socks:
    “You really are a dude, aren’t you?” He smiled.
    “I wasn’t born for this life. I was born for the big world,” Cat said, repeating a phrase he’d heard from a traveling salesman once in a bar in Aracaju.
    Good-Life found him decidedly handsome. Cat had a petulant air and yet there wasn’t any effeminate beauty, he waspleasing to Good-Life, who, besides everything else, hadn’t had much luck with women, because he looked much younger than the thirteen years he was, short and squat. Cat was tall and on his fourteen-year-old lips the fuzz of a mustache he was cultivating was beginning to appear. Good-Life loved him at the start, because he said with certainty:
    “You keep them…I’ll give you my share.”
    “O.K. I owe you.”
    Good-Life tried to take advantage of the other’s thanks in order to begin his conquest. And he ran his hand down Cat’s back, who slipped away with just a body movement. Cat laughed to himself and didn’t say anything. Good-Life thought he shouldn’t insist because he might scare the boy. He knew nothing about Cat and couldn’t imagine that the latter was on to his game. They walked together for part of the night, looking at the city lights (Cat was amazed), and