He loved his little birds
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e demais amava particularmente os passarinhos.
and besides he particularly loved his little birds.
And besides, Pádua doted especially on his birds.
The second reason for humouring him: he 'amava particularmente os passarinhos.' The diminutive passarinhos — little birds — is warm and slightly indulgent, the narrator's fond, faintly amused note on a grown man's harmless obsession. To refuse the tour would be to wound a real, childlike love.
The echo is worth hearing. The novel's most famous character-sentence, a chapter earlier, was 'José Dias amava os superlativos'; here the narrator gives Pádua his own defining love — birds — in the same syntactic mould. Each man is fixed by what he loves: José Dias by inflated words, Pádua by his caged songbirds. It is a quietly generous portrait, one of the few in the book untouched by suspicion. The father is silly and kind, and his passion for small creatures is exactly the sort of soft, unguarded affection Bentinho's own household, ruled by piety and calculation, does not allow itself.
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