The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (10 page)

I went to the saddlebags, took out an old waistcoat in the pocket of which I was carrying the five gold coins, but during that interval I’d got to thinking that maybe the gratuity was excessive, that two coins might be sufficient. Maybe one. As a matter of fact, one coin was enough to make him quiver with joy. I examined his clothing. He was a poor devil who’d never seen a gold coin, One coin, therefore. I took it out, saw it
glitter in the sunlight. The muleteer didn’t see it because I had my back turned, but he may have suspected something. He began talking to the donkey in a meaningful way. He was giving it advice, telling it to watch out, that the “good doctor” might punish it. A paternal monologue. Good Lord! I even heard the smack of a kiss. It was the muleteer kissing it on the head.

“Hurray!” I exclaimed.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but the devilish creature was looking at us with such charm …”

I laughed, hesitated, put a silver
cruzado
in his hand, mounted the donkey, and went off at a slow trot, a little bothered, I should really say a little uncertain of the effect of the piece of silver. But a few yards away I looked back and the muleteer was bowing deeply to me as an obvious sign of contentment. I noted that it must have been just that. I’d paid him well; maybe I’d paid him too much. I put my fingers into the pocket of the waistcoat I was wearing and I felt some copper coins. They were the
vinténs
I should have given the muleteer instead of the silver
cruzado
. Because, after all, he didn’t have any recompense or reward in mind. He’d followed a natural impulse, his temperament, the habits of his trade. Furthermore, the circumstance of his being right there, not ahead and not behind, but precisely at the point of the disaster, seemed to be the simple instrument of Providence. And, in one way or another, the merit of the act was positively nonexistent. I became disconsolate with that reflection. I called myself prodigal. I added the
cruzado
to my past dissipations. I felt (why not come right out with it?), I felt remorse.

Blasted donkey, you made me lose the thread of my reflections! Right now I’m not going to say what I went through from there to Lisbon or what I did in Lisbon, on the Peninsula, or in other places in
Europe, the old Europe that seemed to be rejuvenating at that time. No, I’m not going to say that I was present at the dawn of Romanticism, that I, too, went off to write poetry to that effect in the bosom of Italy. I’m not going to say a thing. I would have to write a travel diary and not memoirs like these, where only the substance of life will enter.

After some years of wandering I heeded my father’s entreaties: “Come home,” he said in his last letter, “if you don’t come quickly you’ll find your mother dead!” That last word was a blow to me. I loved my mother very much. I still had the last blessing she’d given me on board the ship before my eyes. “My poor child, I’ll never see you again!” the unfortunate lady had sobbed, clutching me to her breast. And those words echoed in my ears now like a prophecy fulfilled.

Let it be noted that I was in Venice, still redolent with the verses of Lord Byron. There I was, sunk deep in dreams, reliving the past, thinking that I was in the Most Serene Republic. It’s true. It occurred to me once to ask the innkeeper if the doge would take his walk that day. “What doge,
signer mio?”
I came back to my senses, but I didn’t confess the illusion. I told him that my question was a kind of South American charade. He acted as if he understood and added that he liked South American charades a lot. He was an innkeeper. Well, I left all that, innkeeper, doge, Bridge of Sighs, gondolas, poetry of the lord, ladies of the Rialto, I left it all and took off like a shot in the direction of Rio de Janeiro.

I came … But no, let’s not lengthen this chapter. Sometimes I forget myself when I’m writing and the pen just goes along eating up paper to my great harm, because I’m an author. Long chapters are better suited for logy readers and we’re not an
in-folio
public but an
in-12
one, not much text, wide margins, elegant type, gold trim, and ornamental designs … designs above all… No, let’s not lengthen the chapter.

I came. I won’t deny that when I caught sight of my native city I had a new sensation. It was not the effect of my political homeland, it was that of” the place of my childhood, the street, the tower, the fountain on the corner, the woman in a shawl, the black street sweeper, the things and scenes of boyhood engraved in my memory. Nothing less than a re-birth. The spirit, like a bird, didn’t take into consideration the flow of years, it fluttered toward the original spring and went to drink its cool, pure waters, still not mingled with the torrent of life.

If you take careful note you’ll see a commonplace there. Another commonplace, sadly common, was the family’s consternation. My father embraced me in tears. “Your mother isn’t going to live,” he told me. Indeed, it wasn’t the rheumatism that was killing her anymore, it was a stomach cancer. The poor thing was suffering cruelly because cancer is indifferent to a person’s virtues. My sister Sabina, married by then to Cotrim, was on the point of dropping from fatigue. Poor girl! She got only three hours of sleep a night, no more. Even Uncle João was downcast and sad. Dona Eusébia and some other ladies were there, too, no less sad and no less dedicated.

“My son!”

The pain held back its pincers for a moment. A smile lighted the face of the sick woman over whom death was beating its eternal wings. It was less a face than a skull. Its beauty had passed like a bright day. The bones, which never grow thin, were left. I could hardly recognize her. It had been eight or nine years since we’d seen each other. Kneeling by the foot of the bed with her hands in mine, I remained mute and still, not daring to speak because every word would have been a sob and we were afraid to tell her of the end. Vain fear! She knew that she was close to the end. She told me so. We found out the next morning.

Her agony was long, long and cruel with a meticulous, cold, repetitious cruelty that filled me with pain and bewilderment. It was the first time I’d seen someone die. I’d only known death by hearsay. At most I’d seen it, petrified already, in the face of some corpse I accompanied to the cemetery, or I carried the idea of it wrapped up in the rhetorical
amplifications of professors of ancient matters—the treacherous death of Caesar, the austere death of Socrates, the proud death of Cato, But that duel between to be and not to be, death in action, painful, contracted, convulsive, without any political or philosophical apparatus, the death of a loved one, that was the first time I’d faced it. I didn’t weep. I remember that I hadn’t wept during the whole spectacle. My eyes were dull, my throat tight, my awareness open-mouthed. Why? A creature so docile, so tender, so saintly, who’d never caused a tear of displeasure to fall, a loving mother, and immaculate wife, why did she have to die like that, handled, bitten by the teeth of a pitiless illness? I must confess that it all seemed obscure to me, incongruous, insane …

A sad chapter. Let’s pass on to a happier one.

I was prostrate. And this in spite of the fact that I was a faithful compendium of triviality and presumption at that time. The problem of life and death had never weighed on my brain. Never until that day had I peered into the abyss of the Inexplicable. I lacked the essential thing, which is a stimulus, a sudden impulse …

To tell you the truth, I mirrored the opinions of a hairdresser I’d met in Modena who was distinguished by having absolutely none. He was the flower of hairdressers. No matter how long the operation on the coiffure took, he never got angry. He would intersperse the combing with lots of maxims and jests, full of a certain malice, a zest… He had no other philosophy. Nor did I. I’m not saying that the university hadn’t taught me some philosophical truths. But I’d only memorized the formulas, the vocabulary, the skeleton. I treated them as I had Latin: I put three lines from Virgil in my pocket, two from Horace, and a dozen moral and political locutions for the needs of conversation. I treated
them the way I treated history and jurisprudence. I picked up the phraseology of all things, the shell, the decoration …

Perhaps I’m startling the reader with the frankness with which I’m exposing and emphasizing my mediocrity. Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man. In life the gaze of public opinion, the contrast of interests, the struggle of greed all oblige people to keep quiet about their dirty linen, to disguise the rips and stitches, not to extend to the world the revelations they make to their conscience. And the best part of the obligation comes when, by deceiving others, a man deceives himself, because in such a case he saves himself vexation, which is a painful feeling, and hypocrisy, which is a vile vice. But in death, what a difference! What a release! What freedom! Oh, how people can shake off their coverings, leave their spangles in the gutter, unbutton themselves, unpaint themselves, undecorate themselves, confess flatly what they were and what they’ve stopped being! Because, in short, there aren’t any more neighbors or friends or enemies or acquaintances or strangers. There’s no more audience. The gaze of public opinion, that sharp and judgmental gaze, loses its virtue the moment we tread the territory of death. I’m not saying that it doesn’t reach here and examine and judge us, but we don’t care about the examination or the judgment. My dear living gentlemen and ladies, there’s nothing as incommensurable as the disdain of the deceased.

Drat! My pen got away from me there and slipped into the emphatic. Let’s be simple, as simple as the life I led in Tijuca during the first weeks after my mother’s death.

On the seventh day, when the funeral mass was over, I gathered together a shotgun, some books, clothing, cigars, a houseboy—the Prudêncio of
Chapter XI
—and went off to establish myself in an old house we
owned. My father made an effort to make me change my mind, but I couldn’t and didn’t want to obey him. Sabina wanted me to go live with her for a while—two weeks at least. My brother-in-law was on the point of carrying me off forcibly. He was a good lad, that Cotrim. He’d gone from profligacy to circumspection. Now he was a food merchant, toiling from morning till night with perseverance. In the evening, sitting by the window and twirling his sideburns, that was all he had on his mind. He loved his wife and the son they had at that time who died a few years later. People said he was tightfisted.

I had given up everything. I was in a state of shock. I think it was around that time that hypochondria began to bloom in me, that yellow, solitary, morbid flower with an intoxicating and subtle odor. “’Tis good to be sad and say nothing!” When those words of Shakespeare’s caught my attention I must confess that I felt an echo in myself, a delightful echo. I remember that I felt an echo in myself, a delightful echo. I remember that I was sitting under a tamarind tree with the poet’s book in my hands and my spirit was even more downcast than the character’s,—or crestfallen, as we say of sad hens. I clutched my taciturn grief to my breast with a singular sensation, something that could be called the sensuality of boredom. The sensuality of boredom: memorize that expression, reader, keep it, examine it, and if you can’t get to understand it you may conclude that you’re ignorant of one of the most subtle sensations of this world and that time.

Sometimes I would go hunting, at other times sleep, and at others read—I read a lot—other times, well, I did nothing. I let myself ramble from idea to idea, from imagination to imagination, like a vagrant or hungry butterfly. The hours dripped away, one by one, the sun set, the shadows of night veiled the mountain and the city. No one came to visit me. I had expressly asked to be left alone. One day, two days, three days, a whole week spent like that without saying a word was enough for me to shake off Tijuca and rejoin the bustle. Indeed, at the end of a week I’d had more than enough of solitude. My grief had abated. My spirits were no longer satisfied with only shotgun and books or with the view of the woods and the sky. Youth was reacting, it was necessary to live. I packed away the problem of life and death, the poet’s hypochondriacs, the shirts, the meditations, the neckties in a trunk and I was about to close it when the black boy Prudêncio told me that the day before a person of my acquaintance had moved into a purple house a couple of hundred steps away from ours.

“Who?”

“Does Little Mastér remember Dona Eusehia maybe?”

“I remember … Is it she?”

“She and her daughter. They got in yesterday morning.”

The episode from 1814 came to me immediately and I felt annoyed. But I called my attention to the fact that: events proved me right. Actually, it had been impossible to prevent the intimate relations between Vilaça and the sergeant-major’s sister. Even before I sailed there was already a mysterious wagging of tongues about the birth of a girl. My Uncle João wrote me later that Vilaça, when he died, had left a good legacy to Dona Eusébia, something that caused a lot of talk in the neighborhood. Uncle João himself, greedy when it came to scandal, didn’t talk about anything else in the letter—several pages long, by the by. Events had proved me right. Even though they had, however, 1814 was a long way back and with it Vilaça’s mischief and the kiss in the shrubbery. Finally, no close relations existed between her and me. I made that reflection to myself and finished closing the trunk.

“Isn’t the Little Master going to visit Missy Dona Eusébia?” Prudêncio asked me. “She was the one who dressed the body of my departed mistress.”

I remembered that I’d seen her among other ladies on the occasion of the death and the burial. I didn’t know, however, that she’d lent my mother that final kindness. The houseboy’s reflection was reasonable. I owed her a visit. I decided to do it at once and then leave.