SHAKE YOUR HEAD, READER
Shake your head, reader; make any other gesture of incredulity. You can even hurl away this book if tedium hasn’t led you to do so already; anything is possible. But if you haven’t done so, only now, I trust you will pick it up again and open it at the same page, without necessarily relying on the truthfulness of the author. Yet nothing could be nearer the truth. Those were Capitu’s exact words, and that is how she spoke them. She spoke of her first child as if it were her first doll.
As for my reaction, if the shock was a severe one it came with a singular feeling. A shiver ran through me. That idea of a first child, Capitu’s first child, her marriage to another and hence our absolute separation, the loss, the annihilation – all this produced such an effect as to render me incapable of speech or movement. I sat there stupefied. Capitu smiled, and I saw her first child playing on the ground …