Whenever they can, they sit opposite a mirror. While talking to us, they look at themselves with infatuated eyes. Sometimes, as happens to people in love, they lose track of the conversation. They always liked me, because my adult aversion to my physical appearance made me automatically turn my back to whatever mirror I found. And so they treated me well, for they instinctively recognized that I was the good listener who would always let them show off and have the pulpit.

As a group they weren’t so bad; as individuals, some were better and some were worse. They had tender and generous feelings that an observer of average behaviour would never expect, mean and petty attitudes that a normal human being would hardly imagine. Pathetic, envious and self-deluded – that sums them up, and the same words would sum up whatever part of this milieu has infiltrated the work of worthy men who happened to get caught for a time in its mire. (This explains the presence, in Fialho’s* writings, of flagrant envy, rank vulgarity, and an abominable lack of elegance.)

Some are witty, others have nothing but wit, and still others don’t exist. Café wit may be divided into jokes about those who are absent and jibes at those who are present. This kind of wittiness is known elsewhere as mere vulgarity. There’s no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people’s expense.

I passed by, I saw, and – unlike them – I conquered. Because my victory consisted in seeing. I saw that they were no different from other inferior social groups: in the house where I rent a room, I found the same squalid soul that the café s had already revealed to me, but without – thank all the gods – any delusions of making a hit in Paris. My landlady dreams of Lisbon’s newer section in her moments of imaginative fancy, but she’s spared from the myth of going abroad, and my heart is touched.

From that time I spent at the tomb of human will, I remember a couple of funny jokes and otherwise being bored sick.

They’re heading to the cemetery, and it seems that their past was left behind at the café, for they don’t even mention it now.

…and posterity will never know of them, forever hidden from its view under the rotten heap of pennants they won in their verbal battles.