Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (37 page)

“I think so, sir.”

“So, then,” Siqueira continued, turning to Rubião. “Go on, go on, head down the Rua de Sao Lourenço and go straight to the Campo. Goodbye, until tomorrow,”

Rubião went down three steps—there were five—and stopped in front of the newcomer, stared at him for a few seconds, and
declared that he was very pleased to meet him, that he would make a good husband and son–in–law. What was his name?

“João José Rodrigues.”

“Rodrigues. I’m going to send you a ribbon for your tunic. It’s my wedding present. Remind me, Siqueira.”

“Siqueira took him by the arm so he could go down the last two steps to the street.

“On the Campo, you say?”

“On the Campo.”

“Goodbye.”

From the street Rubião took another look up at the windows with his fingers to his hat as a way of saluting Dona Tonica, but Dona Tonica was in the living room, which Rodrigues had just entered, fresh and delightful, like the first rose of summer.

R
ubião wasn’t thinking about the coach or the cavalry squadron anymore. He went along by himself down several streets until he turned up Sao Jose. From the imperial palace he went along gesticulating and talking to someone he imagined holding by the arm. Was it the Empress Eugenie or Sofia? Both in a single person—or, rather, the second with the name of the first. Men who were passing would stop. People ran to the door from inside their shops. Some laughed, others were indifferent. Some, after seeing what it was, turned their eyes away to spare themselves the sorrow that the sight of his delirium gave them. A mob of urchins was accompanying Rubião, some so close that they could hear his words. Children of all sorts came to join the group. When they caught sight of the general curiosity, they decided to give voice to the mob, and the jeering began.

“Hey, loony! Hey, loony!”

That shouting drew the attention of other people, many house windows began to open, curious people of both sexes and all ages
appeared, a photographer, an upholsterer, three or four figures together, some heads over others, all leaning out, watching, following the man who was talking to the wall, his gestures full of grandeur and courtesy.

“Hey, loony! Hey, loony!” the ragamuffins were bellowing.

One of them, much younger than the rest, clung to the pants of another lanky one. They were on the Rua da Ajuda now. Rubião still heard nothing, but when he did hear something, he imagined it was cheering, and he bowed in thanks. The jeers grew louder. In the midst of the noise the voice of a woman in the door of a mattress shop could be distinguished:

“Deolindo! Come home here, Deolindo!”

Deolindo, the child who was clinging to the pants of an older one, didn’t obey. It could have been that he didn’t hear, the shouting was so loud and the little fellow’s joy was such that he was shouting in his own tiny voice:

“Hey, loony! Hey, loony!”

“Deolindo!”

Deolindo tried to hide among the others to get out of the sight of his mother, who was calling him. She ran to the group, however, and dragged him out. He was really too small to get involved in street tumults.

“Mama, I want to see …”

“See, hah! Come on!”

She put him inside the building and stood in the doorway looking at the street. Rubião was picking up his pace. She could see him clearly with his gestures and his words, his chest out, waving his hat all around.

“Crazy people are funny sometimes,” she said to a neighbor woman, smiling.

The boys continued shouting and laughing, and Rubião kept on walking with the same chorus behind him. Deolindo, at the door, watching the group go off, tearfully begged his mother to let him go too or to take him along. When he’d lost all hope he put all of his energy into one little shrieking shout:

“Hey, loony!”

T
he neighbor woman laughed. The mother laughed too. She confessed that her son was a little pest, a devil who was never still. She couldn’t let him out of her sight. With the least distraction he was out on the street. And that was ever since he was little. He was only two when he almost got killed under a wagon right there. He missed by a hair. If it hadn’t been for a man who was passing, a well-dressed gentleman, who jumped in quickly, even at the risk of his life, he would have been dead, stone dead. At that point her husband, who was coming from across the street, interrupted the conversation. He was frowning, barely greeted the neighbor woman, and went inside. The wife went in to see him. What was wrong? The husband told her about the jeering.

“He passed by here,” she said.

“Didn’t you recognize the man?”

“No.”

The husband crossed his arms and stood staring, silent. The wife asked him who it was.

“It was that man who saved our Deolindo’s life.”

The woman shuddered.

“Did you get a good look?” she asked.

“Good and clear. I’ve come across him other times, but he wasn’t that way then. Poor devil! And the urchins hollering after him. Damn! Aren’t there any police in this country?”

What pained the woman wasn’t so much the man’s illness or the jeering but the part her son had had in it—the same child whose life the man had saved. Really, how could the boy have recognized him or known that he owed his life to him? She was pained by the encounter, by the coincidence. In the end she contented herself with taking on all the blame. If she’d been more careful, the little one wouldn’t have gone out, and he wouldn’t have got mixed up in the mockery. She shuddered from time to time and was restless. The husband took his son’s head in his hand and gave it two kisses.

“Did you see that scene today?” he asked his wife.

“I did.”

“I kept wanting to take the man’s arm and lead him away from here, but I was embarrassed. The hoodlums could have come after me. I turned my head away because he might have recognized me. Poor devil! Did you notice that he didn’t seem to hear anything and that he went happily on his way. I think he was even smiling … It’s a sad thing to lose your mind!”

The woman was thinking about her son’s mischief. She didn’t say anything about it to her husband. She asked her neighbor not to mention it, and at night it took her a long time before she could close her eyes. She’d got it into her head that years later her son would go crazy as punishment for that same mockery and that she would be spitting at heaven, indignant, cursing.

T
wo hours after the scene on the Rua da Ajuda, Rubião reached Dona Fernanda’s house. The urchins were dispersing little by little, and their places weren’t being taken. The last three put their farewells together in one single and formidable roar. Rubião went on alone, unnoticed by the dwellers in the houses because his gesticulating had lessened or changed pattern. He was no longer talking to the wall, to the imagined empress, but he was still emperor. He would walk, stop, murmur something without any grand gestures, still dreaming, still wrapped in that veil through which all things were something else, opposite and better. Every lamppost had the look of a chamberlain, on every corner there was the figure of a groom. Rubião was going straight to the throne room in order to receive some ambassadors or such, but the palace was interminable. He had to pass through so many rooms and galleries, over carpets—and between tall, robust halberdiers.

Of the people who saw him and stopped on the street or leaned out of windows, many suspended their sad or bothersome thoughts and worries of the day for a moment, the tedium, the
resentments, a debt for this one, an illness for that one, slighted in love, betrayed by a friend. Every misery was forgotten, which was better than bemoaning oneself. But the forgetting lasted only as long as a flash of lightning. When the sick man had passed, reality took hold of them again, the streets became streets because the sumptuous palaces went off with Rubião. And more than one felt sorry for the poor devil, comparing their two fates; more than one thanked heaven for the lot that had befallen him—bitter, but conscious. They preferred their real hovels to that phantasmagoric castle.

R
ubião was placed in a hospital. Palha had forgotten the duty Sofia had imposed on him, and Sofia didn’t remember the promise made to the woman from Rio Grande. They were both involved with a new house, a mansion in Botafogo, whose renovation was about to be completed and which they wanted to inaugurate in winter when Parliament was in session and everyone had come down from Petrópolis.
^*
But now the promise was fulfilled. Rubião was accepted into the establishment, where he had a living room and a bedroom, especially arranged through Dr. Falcão and Palha. He offered no resistance. He went along gladly and went into his quarters as if they’d been long familiar to him. When they took their leave, saying they would return later, Rubião invited them to a military review on Saturday.

“Of course, Saturday,” Falcão nodded.

“Saturday’s a good day,” Rubião commented. “Don’t fail to come, Duke of Palha.”

“I won’t,” Palha said, walking out.

“Look, I’m going to send one of my coaches for you, a brand new one. Your wife can’t rest her beautiful body where someone
else dared sit. Damask and velvet cushions, silver harness and wheels of gold. The horses are descended from the very horse my uncle rode at Marengo. Goodbye, Duke of Palha.”

^*
The summer residence of the Brazilian court. [Ed.]

“I
t’s clear to me,” Dr. Falcão was thinking on the way out. ‘That man was the lover of this fellow’s wife.”

T
he man was left there. Quincas Borba tried to get into the carriage that took his friend away and struggled to accompany him by running alongside. The servant had to use all his strength to grab him, hold him, and lock him in the house. It was the same situation as in Barbacena, but life, my fine friend, is made up strictly of four or five situations, which circumstances vary and multiply in people’s eyes. Rubião immediately requested that the dog be sent to him. Dona Fernanda, obtaining the director’s permission, took it upon herself to satisfy the patient’s wishes. She wanted to write a note to Sofia but went to Flamengo in person.

“I
’ll send someone to see him, it’s close by,” Sofia proposed. “Let’s go ourselves. What’s wrong? I’ve already thought about something. Is it worth keeping the house ready and rented since the cure might take a long time? It would be better to let it go, sell the furniture, and settle accounts.”

The walked from Flamengo to the Rua do Principe, three or four minutes away. Raimundo was on the street, but when he saw people at the door, he came over to open it. The inside of the house had a look of abandonment, with no permanence or regularity of things that seemed to hold a remnant of an interrupted life. It was the abandonment of negligence. But, on the other hand, the disorder of the furniture in the parlor expressed quite well the delirium of the one who lived there, his twisted and confused ideas.

“Was he very rich?” Dona Fernanda asked Sofia.

“He had something when he arrived from Minas,” the latter replied, “but it seems that he squandered everything. Careful, lift up your skirt. It doesn’t look as if the floor’s been swept in a hundred years.”

It wasn’t just the floor. The furniture had the crust of neglect. Nor did the servant have anything to say about it. He watched, listened, and softly whistled a popular polka. Sofia didn’t ask him about cleanliness. She was dying to get away from “that filth,” as she said to herself, and she wanted to find out about the dog, which was the main reason for the visit, but she didn’t want to show any great interest in him or anything else. The triviality of it all said nothing to her mind or her heart. The memory of the madman didn’t help her any in tolerating the moment. To herself she thought her companion either singularly romantic or affected. “Such foolishness!” she was thinking without changing the approving smile with which she followed all of Dona Fernanda’s observations.

“Open that window,” the latter said to the servant, “everything smells musty in here.”

“Oh, it’s unbearable!” Sofia agreed, snorting with distaste.

But in spite of the exclamation, Dona Fernanda wasn’t ready
to leave. With no personal memory of those miserable quarters in her mind, she felt taken by a particular and deep upset, but not the kind that the ruination of things gives off. That spectacle didn’t bring her any generalized reflections, it didn’t point out the fragility of the times or the sad state of the world. It only bespoke the illness of a man, a man whom she scarcely knew, to whom she’d spoken only a few times. And she stayed there looking, not thinking, not deducing anything, withdrawn into herself, pained and mute. Sofia didn’t dare speak a word, fearful of its being disagreeable to such a distinguished lady. They were both lifting their skirts so as to avoid getting them dirty. But Sofia added a continuous lively and impatient agitation of her fan to that precaution, like a person who was suffocating in that atmosphere. She got to coughing a few times.

“What about the dog?” Dona Fernanda asked the servant.

“He’s locked up in the bedroom back there.”

“Go get him.”

Quincas Borba appeared. Thin, downcast, he stopped in the parlor door, wondering about the two ladies but without barking. He barely raised his dim eyes. He was about to turn around toward the interior of the house when Dona Fernanda snapped her fingers. He stopped, wagging his tail.

“What’s his name?” Dona Fernanda asked.

“Quincas Borba,” the servant answered, laughing with a weary voice. “He’s got a human name. Hey, Quincas Borba! Go over there, the lady’s calling you.”

“Quincas Borba, come here! Quincas Borba!” Dona Fernanda repeated.

Quincas Borba answered the call, not leaping or happy. Dona Fernanda leaned over and asked him about his friend, if he was far away, if he wanted to see him. Leaning over like that she questioned the servant about the dog’s treatment.