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has a good heart."
    José Dinis had solved the problem of squaring the circle without once seeking advice on tackling that most difficult of operations. He was a bad boy, but he had a good heart.
    ***
    Jealousy was evidently a disease that ran in the Dinis family. During harvest time, but also when the melons were beginning to ripen and the kernels of corn were hardening on the cobs, Uncle Francisco rarely spent a whole night at home. On horseback, his shotgun across his saddle, he would patrol the vast estate, on the lookout for felons, major or minor. I imagine that if he did feel the need for a woman, whether under the lyrical influence of the moon or due to the friction of saddle on crotch, he would trot home, quickly relieve that particular itch, rest a little from the effort, then return to his night patrol. One unforgettable day, in the early hours, my cousin and I were fast asleep, exhausted from the day's various fights and forays, when Uncle Francisco erupted like a fury into the kitchen, brandishing his shotgun and yelling: "Who's been in here?" At first, barely conscious after being so violently wrenched from sleep, I could just make out through the open door the double bed and my aunt sitting up in her white nightdress, clutching her head and moaning: "The man's mad! The man's mad!" He was not perhaps mad, but he was certainly in the grip of jealousy, which comes pretty much to the same thing. He was saying that he would kill us all if we didn't tell him the truth about what had happened, and he kept urging his son to answer, come on, come on, but José Dinis' courage, amply proven in everyday life, failed him completely when confronted by his father armed with a shotgun and almost foaming at themouth. I told my uncle that no one had come into the house, that we had, as usual, gone to bed immediately after supper. "But what about later, can you swear to me that no one else was here?" bawled the Othello of Mouchão de Baixo. I began to grasp what was going on, my poor Aunt Maria Elvira was begging me: "Tell him, Zezito, tell him, because he won't believe me." I think that was the first time in my life that I gave my word of honor. It was comical really, a boy of fourteen giving his word that his aunt had not taken another man into her bed, as if I, who slept like a log, would have noticed (no, I mustn't be so cynical, Aunt Maria Elvira was a thoroughly decent woman), but the fact is that the very solemnity of that word of honor had the desired effect, I suppose because it was so novel, and also because when country people spoke, oaths and curses apart, they meant what they said and didn't waste their breath on flowery rhetoric. My uncle finally calmed down, leaned his shotgun against the wall, and it became clear what had happened. They slept in one of those brass bedsteads with brass rails at the head and the foot, the ends of which were held in place by spherical brass knobs that screwed into the side bars. Clearly, those internal screws had become worn with use and lost their grip. When my uncle came in and turned up the wick on the oil lamp, he had seen what he thought was proof of his dishonor: the rail at the head of the bed had worked loose and hung like an accusing finger over the sleeping woman's head. Aunt Maria Elvira must have raised her arm as she turned over in bed and dislodged the brass rail. I could not at the time imagine what shameful, shocking orgies Francisco Dinis must have imagined, what writhing bodies convulsed by every conceivable erotic extravagance, but the fact that the poor man lacked the intelligence to know which way the wind was blowing, or if indeed there was any wind, shows to what extent jealousy can blind someone to the obvious. Had I been of the cowardly race of Iagos (I know nothing, I saw nothing, I was asleep), then perhaps the night silence in Mouchão de Baixo would have been shattered by two gunshots, and an innocent woman would have lain dead between sheets that