I thought that those two hands had carried our children, and that with them she had bared her breast to nurse them! Some great calamity must come down upon our heads, because I, the master of the house, consented to this shame. And from that time I began to feel a strange fear, a fear I cannot explain, which clings to me and will go on clinging to me until I go mad.

"At first I was ashamed to let my wife see my state, and I fought against myself; but my state grew worse day after day. If I went out of the house I would stop in the middle of the road, cold sweat pouring from my head to my feet. I would look at the sidewalk and not dare to cross over to it, for the trembling of my knees. Sometimes I would wait for a boy to pass and take hold of him, and so manage to reach the sidewalk, because he led me by my hand as a blind man is led."

And the doctor looks with pity and feeling at the yellow face, quivering with a nervous motion that contracts the mouth pitifully, and murmurs between his lips: psicastenia.

"Doctor, sir, I have told you the whole truth. I have stopped going to my work, for I have no strength for labor, because I am a man 'whose affair is finished.' My son has come back from the sanatorium

red-cheeked, sound, and the sputum test gave a clean result. Some days ago my wife, by roundabout ways, led me to a doctor, and he prescribed me a medicine for my nerves. I took the prescription to the owner of the workshop where I used to work — he is a man who knows many things — and he sent me to you."

The sick man ceased speaking, bowed his head humbly, and awaited the final verdict.

The darkness had thickened in the clinic of the doctor, who tried to find words with which to lift the spirit of the tormented patient — bracing words, helping words. But Dr. Sergio had seen much misery and pain in his life, and he knew the paltriness of words before the enormity of human wretchedness.

And outside, the darkness closed around the skyscrapers, and wrapped a hundred Anitas and Carloses, and a hundred Dona Mauds, and a hundred elegant gentlemen going about in splendid motor-cars... And among these human beings the newspaper sellers raised their voices, crying of distant massacres that seem to people dim and unreal, because they happen over there, far away, beyond the seas.

From the Portuguese Author: Elena Silveira Translator: Salma Sayegh