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from my temple. It made the clean, powerful sound of an ax against a tree, and that pellet of steel gleamed in the half light. I flew back to Paris shortly after that and told the paper I was quitting, I was frightened; no one criticized me for it.
    I was about to fall asleep when the telephone started ringing in Antonio’s room, ringing and ringing. At first I thought he wasn’t in there, that he had gone out inthe night. But the ringing stopped and I heard his voice through the closed doors.
    It was calmer than usual, very soft, and I guessed he was talking to a woman. It must have been a call from Paris, I only caught snatches of the conversation but it was in French. Sometimes his voice was a murmur like the whisper of a freshwater spring. I knew it was the woman he had mentioned, that she was unhappy, that he wouldn’t find the words to comfort her.
    So as not to listen, I concentrated on the
Contos aquosos
that I always kept close at hand. My copy was in good condition even though it was old, dated 1973. The cover was dog-eared, that was all.
    Montestrela was obsessed with the passage of time, with old age, degeneration, and death. Half of the short stories tackled this theme, and not always with any distance, or even levity. Sometimes he also descended rather distressingly into pornography, even into scatological vulgarities not worthy of the lyrical poet who had once written the poignant
Prisão
, which Marguerite Yourcenar had praised for the “painful, almost martyred rhythm of its syllables.” Still, I did not allow myself to censure anything, including stories such as this:
    On the island of Pergos, under the reign of Toludey I, the law forbade anyone from taking anything withoutgiving something at the same time. So the inhabitants drank only when they passed urine, and ate only when they defecated. Under these conditions, it was difficult to appreciate the aroma of the dishes during banquets, and culinary art in Pergos deteriorated until the Persian invasion in the third century B.C. , an invasion that brought a salutary end to Toludeyan law.
    At one point, I heard Antonio in his room almost shouting: “Don’t cry, please, I beg you, don’t cry …” There was the sharp clunk of him hanging up and almost immediately the sound of the telephone ringing again. This time Antonio picked up right away.
    I switched on the bedside light and started scribbling the notes that helped me write this passage later. After a few minutes I heard footsteps in the lounge, the sound of a window being opened, and two very quiet knocks on my door.
    I got out of bed and opened the door, Tonio was standing there holding two glasses. The lounge looked subtly alive in the half light, as if inhabited by the breeze and thrum of the city.
    “Sorry to disturb you, I saw the light under the door. Did the phone wake you?”
    I shook my head, but Tonio didn’t wait for an answer and handed me a glass of beer.
    “Here,” he said. “I opened a couple of Sagres from the minibar. Nothing like a cold beer in the middle of the night …”
    I smiled, reached my glass toward his, and he clinked them together with a shy, cautious expression that was probably appropriate for a new friendship. In the darkness his features looked unfamiliar, he looked handsomer, but older too, with more wrinkles and a more receding hairline. He could have been my brother.
    “I’m really sorry about the phone. It was that girl, in Paris, the one who wrote the little note, you know.”
    He sighed, drank some beer. A thought seemed to come to him suddenly.
    “Actually, I think you know her,” he said. “It’s Irene.”
    “Irene?”
    “Yes. Such an old-fashioned name, isn’t it?”
    “Which Irene? The girl in archives? Small, with curly dark hair? Pretty?”
    “Worse. You see, you do know her.”
    I don’t know where I found the strength not to let anything show. I walked over toward the balcony and leaned against the stone parapet, my hands came to