The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (12 page)

The next day as I was getting ready to go back down a butterfly entered my bedroom, a butterfly as black as the other one and much larger. I remembered the episode of the day before and laughed. I immediately began to think about Dona Eusébia’s daughter, the fright she’d had and the dignity that she managed to maintain in spite of it all. The butterfly, after fluttering all about me, alighted on my head. I shook it off. It went on to land on the counterpane and because I chased it off again, it left there and settled on an old portrait of my father. It was as black as night. The soft movement with which it began to move its wings after alighting had a certain mocking way about it that bothered me a great deal. I turned my back, left the room, but when I returned a few minutes later and found it in the same spot I felt a nervous shock. I laid hands on a towel, struck it, and it fell.

It didn’t fall down dead. It was still twisting its body and moving its antennae. I regretted what I’d done, took it in the palm of my hand, and
went over to put it down on the window sill. It was too late. The poor thing expired after a few seconds. I was a little upset, bothered,

“Why the devil wasn’t it blue?” I said to myself.

And that reflection—one of the most profound that has been made since butterflies were invented—consoled me for the evil deed and reconciled me with myself. I let myself contemplate the corpse with a certain sympathy, I must confess. I imagined that it had come out of the woods, having had breakfast, and that it was happy. The morning was beautiful. It came out of there, modest and black, having fun butterflying under the broad cupola of a blue sky, which is always blue for all wings. It came through my window and found me. I suppose it had never seen a man before. It didn’t know, therefore, what a man was. It executed infinite turns around my body and saw that I moved, that I had eyes, arms, legs, a divine look, colossal stature. Then it said to itself: “This is probably the inventor of butterflies.” The idea subjugated it, terrified it, but fear, which is also suggestive, hinted to it that the best way to please its creator was to kiss him on the forehead, and it kissed me on the forehead. When I drove it away, it went to land on the counterpane. There it saw my father’s picture and it’s quite possible that it discovered a half-truth there, to wit, that this was the father of the inventor of butterflies, and it flew over to beg his mercy.

Then the blow of a towel put an end to the adventure. The blue immensity was of no use to it, nor the joy of the flowers, nor the splendor of the green leaves against a face towel, a foot of raw linen. See how fine it is to be superior to butterflies! Because, it’s proper to say so, had it been blue, or orange, its life wouldn’t have been any more secure. It was quite possible that I would have run it through with a pin for the pleasure of my eyes. It wasn’t. That last idea gave me back my consolation. I put my middle finger against my thumb, gave a flick, and the corpse fell into the garden. It was time. The provident ants were already arriving … No, I go back to the first idea: I think it would have been better had it been born blue.

I went on from there to finish my preparations for the trip. I’m not going to delay it any more. I’m going down immediately. I’m going down even if some circumspect reader holds me back to ask if the last chapter is only a disagreeable incident or whether I’d been made a fool of… Alas, I didn’t count on Dona Eusébia. I was all ready when she came into the house. She was coming to invite me to postpone my descent and come have dinner with her that day. I worked hard at turning her down, but she insisted so much, so very much, ever so much that I couldn’t help accepting. Besides, I owed her those amends. I went.

Eugênia didn’t put on her adornments for me that day. I think they’d been for me—unless she went around like that a lot of times. Not even the gold earrings she’d worn the day before were hanging from her ears now, two delicately shaped ears on the head of a nymph. A simple white muslin dress without any decorations, having a mother-of-pearl button at the neck instead of a brooch and another button at the wrists, closing the sleeves, without a shadow of a bracelet.

That was how she was in body and no less in spirit. Clear ideas, simple manners, a certain natural grace, the air of a lady, and, I don’t know, perhaps something else. Yes, a mouth exactly like her mother’s, which recalled the episode in 1814 for me and then I had an urge to gloss the same verse for the daughter …

“Now let me show you the property,” the mother said as we finished the last sip of coffee.

We went out onto the veranda, from there to the grounds, and it was then that I noticed something. Eugênia was limping slightly, so slightly that I asked her if she’d hurt her foot. Her mother fell silent. The daughter answered without hesitation.

“No, sir, I’ve been lame from birth.”

I cursed myself to every hell there was. I called myself clumsy, rude. Really, the simple possibility of her being lame was enough not to ask anything. Then I remember the first time I’d seen her—the day before—the girl had approached her mother’s chair slowly, and on that same day I’d found her already at the dinner table. It might have been to
hide the defect. But what was her reason for confessing it now? I looked at her and noted that she was sad.

I tried to get rid of the remains of my blunder—it wasn’t difficult, because the mother was, as she’d confessed, an old carouser and she quickly started a conversation with me. We looked over the whole property, trees, flowers, duck pond, laundry tank, an infinity of things that she kept showing me and commenting on while I, surreptitiously, scrutinized Eugênia’s eyes …

I give my word that Eugênia’s look didn’t limp but was straight, perfectly healthy. It came from a pair of dark and tranquil eyes. I think that they were lowered two or three times, a little cloudy, but only two or three times. In general they looked at me with frankness, without timidity or false modesty.

The worst of it was that she was lame. Such lucid eyes, such a fresh mouth, such ladylike composure—and lame! That contrast could lead one to believe that nature is sometimes a great mocker. Why pretty if lame? Why lame if pretty? That was the question I kept asking myself on my way back home at night without hitting upon the solution to the enigma. The best thing to do when an enigma is unresolved is to toss it out the window. That was what I did. I laid hand onto another towel and drove off that other black butterfly fluttering in my bran. I felt relieved and went to bed. But dreams, which are a loophole in the spirit, let the bug back in and I spent the whole night delving into the mystery without explaining it.

It was raining that morning and I postponed my descent. But the next day the morning was clear and blue and in spite of that I let myself
stay, the same on the third day, the fourth, right to the end of the week. Beautiful, cool, inviting mornings. Down below, the family, the bride, parliament were calling me and I was unable to attend to anything, bewitched at the feet of my Crippled Venus. Bewitched is just a way of enhancing style. There was no bewitchment but, rather, pleasure, a certain physical and moral satisfaction. I loved her, true. At the feet of that so artless creature, a spurious, lame daughter, the product of love and disdain, at her feet I felt good, and she, I think, felt even better at my feet. And all that in Tijuca. A simple eclogue. Dona Eusébia kept watch over us, but not so very much. She tempered necessity with expedience. The daughter, in that first explosion of nature, gave me her soul in bloom.

“Are you going back down tomorrow?” she asked on Saturday.

“I’m planning to.”

“Don’t.”

I didn’t go back down and I added a verse to the Gospel: “Blessed are they who do not descend for theirs is the first kiss of young girls.” Indeed, Eugênia’s first kiss came on a Sunday—the first, which no other male had taken from her, and it wasn’t stolen or snatched, but innocently offered, the way an honest debtor pays a debt. Poor Eugênia! If you only knew what ideas were drifting out of my mind on that occasion! You, quivering with excitement, your arms on my shoulders, contemplating your welcome spouse in me, and I, my eyes on 1814, on the shrubbery, on Vilaça, and suspecting that you couldn’t lie to your blood, to your origins…

Dona Eusébia entered unexpectedly, but not so suddenly as to catch us at each other’s feet. I went to the window. Eugênia sat down to adjust one of her braids. Such delightful pretense! Such infinitely delicate skills! Such profound Tartuffeanism! And all of it natural, alive, unstudied, as natural as appetite, as natural as sleep. So much the better! Dona Eusébia didn’t suspect anything.

There among the five or six people reading me is some sensitive soul who must surely be a bit upset with the previous chapter and who begins to tremble over Eugênia’s fate and, perhaps … yes, perhaps deep down inside is calling me a cynic. I, a cynic, sensitive soul? By Diana’s thigh, that insult deserves being washed away in blood, if blood can wash anything away in this world. No, sensitive soul, I’m not a cynic, I was a man. My brain was a stage on which plays of all kinds were presented: sacred dramas, austere, scrupulous, elegant comedies, wild farces, short skits, buffoonery, pandemonium, sensitive soul, a hodgepodge of things and people in which you could see everything, from the rose of Smyrna to the rue in your own backyard, from Cleopatra’s magnificent bed to the corner of the beach where the beggar shivers in his sleep. Crossing it are thoughts of varied types and shapes. There wasn’t only the atmosphere of water and hummingbird there, there was also that of snail and toad. Take back the expression, then, sensitive soul, control your nerves, clean your glasses—because this is sometimes due to glasses—and let’s be done with this flower from the shrubbery.

It so happened that a week later, as if I were on the road to Damascus, I heard a mysterious voice that whispered the words of the Scripture (Acts, 9:6) to me:
“Arise, and go into the city.”
That voice was coming from myself and it had a double origin: the pity that rendered
me helpless before the innocence of the little one, and the terror of really falling in love with her and marrying her. A lame woman! As for that being the reason for my descent, there’s no doubt that she thought so and she told me. It was on the veranda on a Monday afternoon when I told her I would be going back down the next morning. “Goodbye,” she sighed, holding out her hand with simplicity. “You’re doing the right thing.” And since I didn’t say anything, she went on. “You’re doing the right thing in running away from the ridiculous idea of marrying me.” I was going to tell her, no. She withdrew slowly, swallowing her tears. I caught up with her after a few steps and swore to her by all the saints in heaven that I was obliged to go back down, but that I hadn’t stopped loving her and very much. All cold hyperbole, which she listened to without saying anything.

“Do you believe me?” I finally asked.

“No, and I say you’re doing the right thing.”

I tried to hold her back, but the look she gave me was no longer a plea but a command. I went down from Tijuca the next morning a little embittered but also a little satisfied. I went along saying to myself that it was right to obey my father, that it was fitting to take up a political career … that the constitution … that my bride … that my horse …

My father, who hadn’t been expecting me, embraced me, full of tenderness and thanks. “Is it true, then?” he said. “Can I finally …?”

I left him with that reticence and went to take off my boots, which were tight. Once relieved, I took a deep breath and stretched out while my feet and all that extended up from them went into relative bliss. Then I pondered the fact that tight boots are one of the best bits of good fortune on earth, because by making one’s feet hurt they give occasion
to the pleasure of taking them off. Punish your feet, wretch, then unpunish them and there you have cheap happiness, at the mercy of shoemakers and worthy of Epicurus. While that idea was working out on my famous trapeze, I cast my eyes up toward Tijuca and saw the little cripple disappearing over the horizon of the past and I felt that my heart wouldn’t be long in taking off its boots either. And they were taken off by lechery. Four or five days later I was savoring that quick, ineffable, and irrepressible moment of pleasure that follows a sharp pain, a preoccupation, an indisposition … From that I inferred that life is the most ingenious of phenomena because hunger only becomes sharp with an aim to bring on the occasion for eating, and that life only invented calluses because they perfect earthly happiness. In all truth I can tell you that all of human wisdom isn’t worth a pair of short boots.

You, my Eugênia, never took them off. You went along the road of life limping from your leg and from love, sad as a pauper’s burial, solitary, silent, laborious, until you, too, came to this other shore … What I don’t know is whether your existence was quite necessary for the century. Who knows? Maybe one less walk-on would make the human tragedy a failure.

Finally! Here’s Virgília. Before going to Councilor Dutra’s house I asked my father if there was any commitment of marriage.

“No commitment. Some time back, while speaking to him about you, I confessed my desire to see you a deputy. And I spoke in such a way that he promised to do something and I think he will. As for the bride—that’s the name I give to a lovely creature who’s a jewel, a flower, a star, something rare … She’s his daughter. I imagined that if you married her you’d get to be a deputy quicker.”