She was only sixteen, but she enchanted us with her confident ease on the stage, whether she was playing a cynical, heavily made-up puta in one of Dona Esmeralda's more realistic plays or a woman poetically balancing a water jug on her head beside some imaginary river whose invisible water flowed across the stage. All of us bakers loved her, and we mourned long and deep when one day she no longer appeared on the stage. An official from a foreign embassy, who had come to the theatre one night and had in due course returned for twenty-three performances in a row, proposed to Eliza, and then they left for some country on the other side of the sea. I often wondered what Dona Esmeralda had felt at that moment, whether she felt betrayed and sad, or whether she was full of anger. She never said a word.

Some months later she discovered Marguerida, who before long had made the memory of Eliza fade. The world of the theatre was a world which never seemed to come to an end.

For me, José Antonio Maria Vaz, it meant a whole new life when I stepped before Dona Esmeralda's eyes and found deliverance and work. Afterwards I thought that even though my father had done nothing but talk his whole life, at least he had been right about my hands. I was truly a baker; I had landed in the right place in life, the place that everyone searches for but so few actually find. I made friends with the other bakers and the enticing girls who stood behind the counter and sold the fresh, fragrant bread. I got to know all the people who lived around the theatre, on the broad avenue which runs straight through the city up to the old fortress where Dom Joaquim's equestrian statues stood abandoned. And I became especially good friends with the street kids who lived in cardboard boxes and rusting cars, surviving on whatever they could find in the rubbish bins, whatever they could manage to steal and then sell, or sell and then steal back.

That was also the first time I heard about Nelio.