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cabinet drawers half-open, the uncapped eau de cologne. He’d been vegetating in solitude for months. Antonym gazed at himself between the specks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror. He’d never asked himself: Who am I? Rather, he’d asked: Is that really me? It was as if the face he saw masked an unfathomable essence that couldn’t be recognised in his features, gestures, emotions, and thoughts. And the terror of this brief lucidity killed him a little.
    His own Pontius Pilate, he rinsed his hands and eyes. While he was on his way to the kitchen, the telephone rang.
    â€˜Antonym?’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜It’s Hemistich.’
    â€˜It’s been donkey’s … ’
    â€˜I know, I reckon it’s been, what … eight years since we last saw each other?’
    â€˜Something like that.’
    â€˜It’s hard to be your friend. You don’t call anyone; you always have to be called.’
    â€˜I know, that’s just me.’
    â€˜And here I am once again. Do you know why? Because you’re worth it.’
    â€˜I hope to let you down.’
    â€˜You’re worth it.’
    â€˜My phone number, how’d you … ’
    â€˜Bernadette. I ran into her at a dinner. A work thing, I think.’
    â€˜You, at one of those dinners?’
    â€˜It was at my restaurant.’
    â€˜â€¦â€™
    â€˜Hello?’
    â€˜I’m here … Your restaurant?’
    â€˜There are those who call it a steakhouse. Let me give you the address.’
    Hemistich remembered in detail things that everyone else had forgotten. Figures of speech, for example. He didn’t need to look in a dictionary to know what ‘anastrophe’ meant. This made him self-assured. Poet, writer, translator, editor, Master of Philosophy — the biographical footnotes of his articles varied according to need. They contrasted with his fidelity to certain stylistic additives and lubricants in his musings on everything. But the great feat of his career had been the timely domestication of his caustic sense of humour. When he was still young he had almost lost everything after having called a well-known concrete poet ‘(in)significant’. He was funny and a good conversationalist, but too intense. Hard to live with. He managed to be eternally surrounded by friends, due to the fact that they were never the same ones.
    Antonym was shocked. Hemistich Borba the Second, the quintessential Brazilian intellectual, had ended up running a steakhouse.

IV
    The transience of his desire had found a golden mean in the price of satisfying it. Besides, he wasn’t in a position to spend a lot. He left her ‘come again’ behind, and he took the lift down, buried alive. In those days so predictable in their misery, he had clung to routine, discipline, schedules. His regular weekly hour with prostitutes was part of this scheme.
    He hesitated briefly at the door of the building. Noticing a vagrant on his left, he turned right. The cathedral loomed before him — an insect with gothic antennae and a rotten apple on its back in the guise of a dome. The stench of urine and fried food rose up from the Portuguese mosaic pavement. Before climbing the stairs, he freed himself from the gypsy woman intent on reading his palm, dodged the man selling limes, and pushed away the street kid tugging at his pants. The inside of the church wasn’t much different from the reality around it. While beauty hinders asceticism, so does ugliness. Antonym thus experienced no elevation, inner peace, or reconciliation with the human race in the time he sat there. It was just cooler.
    A priest came out of a door next to the high altar, and approached him. Antonym stood up. Was it possible?
    â€˜Father Farfarello … ’
    Domenico Farfarello had been his grammar teacher at school. Short and bald, with cerulean-blue eyes and an aquiline nose, he used to spend a considerable amount of time in front