At first, he was an excellent clerk: punctual, elegant handwriting, and the bosses were very pleased with him.

He got married quite young, and you’d have thought a life of marital bliss lay ahead. But you’d have been wrong.

Two or three years after his marriage, he started going off the rails, via drink and gambling.

Not surprisingly, his wife started expressing disapproval.

At first, he listened passively to these strictures from his better half, but it wasn’t long before they made him furious and he started responding with violence.

She’d done nothing wrong, but might there have been hidden extenuating circumstances to explain the transformation in her husband? She, however, wasn’t interested in that: she carried on complaining. Which only made her husband’s reaction more violent. Even so, she put up with it for quite some time.

One day, however, she’d had enough; she left her unhappy home and went to stay with a couple she knew; but they treated her like a skivvy; she left that house as well and descended into poverty, ending up – homeless, dirty and in rags – selling her body in the most insalubrious parts of Rio de Janeiro.

Whenever anyone raised concerns with Anacleto about what had happened to his wife, he fell into a rage:

“That filthy tramp can die, for all I care! She means nothing to me.”

(He said even worse things, which I think it better not to recount.)

She died in the street. When I read the news about the death of an unidentified vagrant woman, I suspected it was her and immediately urged Anacleto to go and identify the body. But he just shouted, “It’s all one to me, whether it’s her or not, whether dead or alive!

I didn’t insist, but everything suggested it really was the body of Anacleto’s wife that was lying in the mortuary.

Several years later, Anacleto lost his job as a result of his disordered life; but, thanks to the intervention of some old friends, he managed to get another, as a civil servant in the north.

A year or two after that I received a letter from him asking me to get a police certificate confirming that his wife had died in the street and had been buried at public expense. This was because he needed to prove he was a widower, as he wanted to marry a widow who was reputed to be wealthy.

I did my best, but it proved impossible: because he hadn’t identified the body of his poor wife, for all intents and purposes he was still married.

And that’s how Anacleto’s wife took her posthumous revenge. He’ll never remarry, be the bride rich or poor.