CXLV - The Return

by Machado de Assis

　　Now it was already in this house that one day, when I was getting dressed for lunch, I received a card with this name:

　　EZEQUIEL A. OF SANTIAGO class = "center"

　　- Is the person there? I asked the servant.

　　-Yes sir; waited.

　　I did not go soon; I fil-o wait a ten or fifteen minutes in the room. It was only later that he reminded me that I was going to have a little fuss and run, hug him, talk to his mother. The mother, I believe she has not yet said that she was dead and buried. Was; there lies in old Switzerland. I just got dressed in a hurry. When I left the room, I took ares de pae, a pae between meek and curly, half Dom Casmurro. As I entered the room, I found a young man with his back to the wall of Massinissa's bust. I came cautious, and I made no sound. Nevertheless, he heard my footsteps, and turned quickly. He knew me by the pictures and ran to me. I did not move; was no more and no less my old and young companion of the Seminary of St Joseph, a little lower, less full of body, and save the colors that were alive, the same face of my friend. It was modern, of course, and the manners were different, but the general aspect reproduced the dead person. It was his own, the exact one, the real Escobar. It was my battle; was his father's son. He dressed in mourning for his mother; I was in black too. We sat down.

　　"Papa does not differ from the last pictures," he told me.

　　The voice was the same as that of Escobar, the accent was ardent. I explained that I really did not really differ from what it was, and I began an interrogation to have less to speak and thus dominate my emotion. But this even excited the face of him, and my colleague of the seminary was resurfacing more and more of the cemetery. Here I stand, before me, with equal laughter and greater respect; total, the same gift and the same grace. He longed to see me. The mother spoke highly of me, praising me extraordinarily, as the purest man in the world, the most worthy of being loved.

　　"She was beautiful," he concluded.

　　-Let's have lunch.

　　If you think the lunch was bitter, you fool yourself. Had his minutes of annoyance, it's true; at first it hurt me that Ezekiel was not really my son, that I did not complete and continue. If the boy had gone to his mother, I would have come to believe it all, much more easily than he seemed to have left me on the eve of the evening, evoking childhood, scenes and words, going to college ...

　　"Papa still remembers when you took me to college?" he asked, laughing.

　　"Shall I not remember?"

　　"It was in Lapa; I was desperate, and Papa would not stop, he would give me every tug, and I with my little legs .... Yes, sir, I accept.

　　He held out the glass to the wine I offered him, drank a sip, and continued to eat. Escobar ate like that too, his face on his plate. He told me about life in Europe, his studies, particularly those of archeology, which was his passion. He spoke of antiquity with love, counted Egypto and his thousands of centuries, without losing himself in the figures; He had the father's arithmetical head. I, since the idea of ​​the fatherhood of the other was already familiar to me, did not like the resurrection. Sometimes he would shut his eyes to see no gestures or anything, but the goblin spoke and laughed, and the dead man spoke and laughed at him.

　　If there was no remedy other than to stay with him, I made myself truly pae. The idea that he might have seen some photograph of Escobar, which Captain Carelessly took with him, did not come to me, nor, if he did, would he persist. Ezekiel believes in me as in the mother. If Jose Dias were alive, I would find him in my own person. Justina wanted to see him, but being ill, she asked me to take him there. I knew that kinswoman. I believe that the desire to see Ezekiel was for the purpose of verifying in the young man the bond that he might have found in the boy. It would be a last gift; I caught him in time.

　　"It is very bad," I said to Ezekiel that he wanted to go there, any emotion could bring him to death. We'll go there when it gets better.

　　We were not; death took her within a few days. She falls in the Lord or whatever it is. Ezekiel saw his face in the coffin and did not know it, nor could he, so did the years and death. On the way to the cemetery, they remembered a lot of things, some street, some tower, a stretch of beach, and it was all joy. This was the way he always went home at the end of the day; he told me the memories he was receiving from the streets and houses. Many of them were astonished to be the same as he had left, as if the houses were killing girls.

　　At the end of six months, Ezekiel spoke to me on a trip to Greece, to Egypt, and to Palestine, a scientific journey, a promise made to some friends."What sex?" I asked laughing.He smiled in annoyance and told me that women were such fashionable and day-old creatures who would never understand a ruin of thirty centuries. They were two college colleges. I gave him resources, and I gave him the exact first money. Commigo said that one of the consequences of the father's stealthy love was to pay for his son's archeology; I was so cruel and perverse that I took the boy and tried to open it to his heart, but I drew back; I looked at him afterwards, as one does to a real son; The eyes he laid on me were tender and grateful.