The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (16 page)

Virgília

Brás Cubas

Virgília

Brás Cubas

Virgília

Brás Cubas

Virgília

Brás Cubas

Virgília

But, dash it all! Who can explain the reason for this difference to me? At one time we kept company, discussed marriage, broke up, and separated, coldly, painlessly, because there’d been no passion. I only carried away a little spite and nothing else. The years pass, I see her again, we take three or four turns in a waltz, and here we are, madly in love with each other. Virgília’s beauty, it’s true, had reached a high degree of perfection, but we were substantially the same and I, for my part, hadn’t become more handsome or more dashing. Who will explain the reason for that difference to me?

The reason couldn’t have been anything else but the opportune moment, because if on that first occasion neither of us was too green for love, both of us were for
our
love, a fundamental distinction. No love is possible without the opportunity of the subjects. I found that explanation myself two years after the kiss one day when Virgília was complaining to me about a fop who kept flirting with her tenaciously.

“What a pest! How importune!” she said, putting on an angry face. I shuddered, stared at her, saw that the indignation was sincere. Then, it occurred to me that maybe I’d brought on that same frown at some time and I immediately understood the degree of my evolution. I’d gone from importune to opportune.

Yes, sir, we were in love. Now that all the social laws forbade it, now was when we truly loved each other. We found ourselves yoked together like the two souls the poet encountered in Purgatory:

and I’m wrong comparing us to oxen because we were a different species of animal, less sluggish, more roguish and lascivious. There we were, going along without knowing where to, on what secret roads, a problem that frightened me for a few weeks but whose outcome I turned over to fate. Poor Fate! Where can you be walking now, great supervisor of human affairs? Maybe you’re growing a new skin, a different face, different ways, a different name, and it’s even possible that… I forget where I was… Ah, yes, on secret roads. I said to myself that now it would be whatever God willed. It was our fate to fall in love. If it hadn’t been, how could we explain the waltz and all the rest? Virgília was thinking the same thing. One day, after confessing to me that she had
moments of remorse, since I’d told her that if she felt remorse it was because she didn’t love me, Virgília clasped me in her magnificent arms, murmuring:

“I love you. It’s the will of heaven.”

And that wasn’t just random words. Virgília was somewhat religious. She didn’t go to mass on Sundays, it’s true, and I even think she only went to church on feast days and when there was a vacant pulpit somewhere. But she prayed every night, fervently, or sleepily at least. She was afraid of thunder. On those occasions she’d cover her ears and mumble all the prayers in the catechism. In her bedroom she had a small carved jacaranda prie-dieu, three feet high and with images inside. But she never mentioned it to her friends. On the contrary, she would tag as fanatics those who were simply religious. For some time I suspected that there was a certain annoyance with belief in her and that her religion was a kind of flannel undergarment, hidden and cozy, but I was obviously mistaken.

Lobo Neves gave me great fear at first. An illusion! He never tired of telling me how he loved his wife. He thought that Virgília was perfection itself, a combination of solid and refined qualities, loving, elegant, austere, a model woman. And the confidence didn’t stop there. From the crack that it once was it grew to be a wide-open door. One day he confessed to me that he had a sad worm gnawing at his existence. He needed public glory. I bolstered his spirits, told him many nice things that he listened to with that religious unction of a desire that doesn’t want to finish dying. Then I realized that his ambition was fatigued from beating its wings and being unable to take flight. Days later he told me about all his annoyance and weariness, the bitter pills
he’d swallowed, spites, intrigues, perfidy, interests, vanity. There was obviously a crisis of melancholy there. I tried to fight against it.

“I know what I’m talking about,” he replied sadly. “You can’t imagine what I’ve been through. I went into politics because of a liking for it, the family, ambition, and a little bit because of vanity: You can see that I have in me all the motives that lead a man into public life. All I was missing was interest in a different way. I’d seen the theatre from the audience’s side and, I swear, it was beautiful! Superb sets, life, movement and grace in the performance. I signed on. They gave me a role that… but why am I boring you with all this? Let me keep my afflictions to myself. Believe me, I’ve spent hours, days … There’s no constancy of feelings, there’s no gratitude, there’s no nothing … nothing … nothing.”