The Ex-Magician and Other Stories by Murilo Rubião

Author:Murilo Rubião [Rubião, Murilo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780060137083
Amazon: 0060137088
Publisher: Harper & Row
Published: 1979-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Man in the Gray Cap

I, Nebuchadnezzar, was at rest in mine house, and flourishing in my palace.

Daniel, iv:4.

It was the fault of the man in the gray cap.

Before he arrived, our street was the quietest in the city. It had a wide promenade where the children would play. Streets full of children. They would fill the wintry, misty evening with sweet clamor, singing in a circle or running back and forth from one tree to another.

Our uneasiness actually began the morning we were awakened by the extraordinary commotion of trucks unloading heavy crates outside the old hotel building. We were told, later on, it was all furniture belonging to a wealthy bachelor who had decided to take up residence there. I thought such an idea preposterous. Besides being much too large for only one person, the whole house was falling apart. The number of crates stacked up, all along the spacious veranda of the building, suggested some less improbable hypothesis. Perhaps the place had been rented as a warehouse for some commercial establishment.

My brother Artur, constantly at the mercy of an exaggerated set of sensibilities, energetically found fault with my explanation. Nervously, he maintained that the houses were beginning to shake, and he pointed skyward, where gray alternated with white. (Gray spaces, white spaces, perfect little squares in both colors, in quick succession, vibrant, pulsating.)

Well, this time it seemed my mania for contradiction had led me to commit a gross error in judgment, because before the week was out the new neighbor had arrived. Covering his head, he wore a (gray and white) checkered cap and, between his dark teeth, sported a curved pipe. His eyes were sunken, his baggy clothes overwhelming a tiny, almost skeletal frame that was being jerked along by a ridiculous- looking setter. Yet, instead of adopting the same derisive attitude I had assumed in the face of so grotesque a figure, Artur became completely upset:

“That man caused the checkered sky, but it won’t be long before he disappears.”

§

Very few would remain unimpressed with the old bachelor’s behavior. His strange habits soon left residents on the street wholly perplexed. He was never seen to leave the house, but every day, at five o’clock in the afternoon, with absolute punctuality, he would step out onto the front porch. Never without his gray cap, which most likely concealed an advanced case of baldness, he simply took a few puffs on his pipe and went back inside. The rest of the time he seemed invisible.

Artur would spend the whole day spying on him, animated by a ridiculous desire to see him come out before the specified hour. Yet he wouldn’t become discouraged each time his hopes were undeceived. His excitement mounted, however, as the moment approached to observe, once again, the solitary tenant of the neighboring mansion. And each time he spotted him, it seemed to make him absurdly happy:

“Look, Roderico, he’s thinner than yesterday!”

I soon became annoyed with Artur and told him not to bother me, and that he shouldn’t waste so much time on other people’s lives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.