"I] used to read the writings of monks to study miracles and the [Portuguese] language, and to fill

[myself] with history, faith, and linguistic purity."

Dear Freitas Fortuna,

My dear friend

I reaffirm, with this letter, what I proposed to you in relation to my corpse and your tomb in the Lapa Cemetery. I desire to be buried there and that no strength or reason might talk you out of conserving my ashes in perpetuity in your chapel. Naturally, nobody will fight you for the possession of those ashes; I fear, however, that there may yet be a posthumous disaster that conspires to impose violence even on my remains.

The novel written next [after Romance dum homem rico] was Amor de Perdição (Doomed Love). Since I was a lad I had been hearing the sad tale of my paternal uncle, Simão António Botelho. My aunt, his sister, prompted by my novelistic curiosity, was always ready to repeat the saga, which was linked to her youth.

I come, then, to sit at this bench where I give dramatic form to the dialogue of my spectres, and I convince myself that I belong truly to the living, to my time, to the social circle, to industry, and I send my insomnias to be sold to Ernesto Chardron.

A recent friend of mine, a curious theatre-goer, on those inauspicious evenings, says that he often felt a thud on the top of his hat, and found the pectoral cavity of a chicken, or a fragment of a piece of hake. So it is that, during the intervals, the honourable tenants of the boxes would fill their time with delightful titbits, thus splitting the hours between the nourishment of the spirit with drama and, a little less sensitively, that of the stomach with a fragrant basin of excellent oven-baked rice.