The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (19 page)

“He is, yes, little master.”

“What did he do?”

“He’s a loafer and a big drunk. Only today I left him in the store while I went downtown and he went off to a bar to drink.”

“It’s all right, forgive him,” I said.

“Of course, little master. Your word is my command. Get on home with you, you drunkard!”

I left the crowd of people who were looking at me with wonder and whispering conjectures. I went on my way, unraveling an infinite number of reflections that I think I’ve lost completely. They would have been material for a good and maybe happy chapter. I like happy chapters, they’re my weakness. On the outside the Valongo episode was dreadful, but only on the outside. As soon as I stuck the knife of rationality deeper into it I found it to have a happy, delicate, and even profound marrow. It was the way Prudêncio had to rid himself of the beatings he’d received by transmitting them to someone else. As a child I used to ride on his back, put a bit into his mouth, and whip him mercilessly. He would moan and suffer. Now that he was free, however, he had the free use of himself, his arms, his legs, he could work, rest, sleep unfettered from his previous status. Now he could make up for everything. He bought a slave and was paying him back with high interest the amount he’d received from me. Just look at the subtlety of the rogue!

The case makes me remember a loony I knew. His name was Romualdo and he said he was Tamerlane. It was his great and only mania and he had a strange way of explaining it.

“I am the famous Tamerlane,” he would say. “Formerly I was Romualdo, but I fell ill and I took so much tartar, so much tartar, so much tartar that I became a Tartar, and even king of the Tartars. Tartar has the property of producing Tartars.”

Poor Romualdo! People laughed at his response, but it’s likely that the reader isn’t laughing, and rightfully so. I don’t find it funny at all. When you first hear it, it has a touch of humor, but told like this, on paper, and with reference to a whipping received and passed on, I have to confess that it’s much better to get back to the little house in Gamboa and put the Romualdos and Prudêncios aside.

Let’s get back to the little house. You wouldn’t be able to enter it today, curious reader. It grew old, blackened, rotting, and the owner tore it down to replace it with another three times bigger, but, I swear to you, lesser than the first one. The world may have been too small for Alexander, but the eaves of a garret are an infinity for swallows.

Take a look now at the neutrality of this globe that carries us through space like a lifeboat heading for shore: today a virtuous couple sleeps on the same plot of ground that once held a sinning couple. Tomorrow a churchman may sleep there, then a murderer, then a blacksmith, then a poet, and they will all bless that corner of earth that gave them a few illusions.

Virgília turned the house into a jewel. She arranged for household items that were just right and placed them about with the aesthetic intuition of an elegant woman. I brought in some books, and everything was under the care of Dona. Placida, the purported and in certain respects the real lady of the house.

It was very difficult for her to accept the house. She’d sniffed out the intention and her position pained her, but she finally gave in. I think she wept at the beginning, was sick with herself. What was certain at least was that she didn’t lift her eyes to me during the first two months. She spoke to me with her look lowered, serious, frowning, sad sometimes. I wanted to win her over and didn’t act offended, treating her
with affection and respect. I made a great effort to win her good will, then her trust. When I obtained her trust, I made up a pathetic story about my love for Virgília, a situation before her marriage, her father’s resistance, her husband’s harshness, and I don’t know how many other novelistic touches. Dona Plácida didn’t reject a single page of the novel. She accepted them all. It was a necessity of her conscience. At the end of six months anyone who saw the three of us together would have said that Dona Plácida was my mother-in-law.

I wasn’t ungrateful. I made her a special gift of five
cantos
—the five
cantos
found in Botafogoas—as a nest egg for her old age. Dona Plácida thanked me with tears in her eyes and from then on never ceased to pray for me every night before an image of the Virgin she had in her room. That was how her nausea ceased.

I’m beginning to regret this book. Not that it bores me, I have nothing to do and, really, putting together a few meager chapters for that other world is always a task that distracts me from eternity a little. But the book is tedious, it has the smell of the grave about it; it has a certain cadaveric contraction about it, a serious fault, insignificant to boot because the main defect of this book is you, reader. You’re in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly. You love direct and continuous narration, a regular and fluid style, and this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble, yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble, and fall …

And they do fall! Miserable leaves of my cypress of death, you shall fall like any others, beautiful and brilliant as you are. And, if I had eyes, I would shed a nostalgic tear for you. This is the great advantage of death, which if it leaves no mouth with which to laugh, neither does it leave eyes with which to weep … You shall fall.

Maybe I’ll leave out the previous chapter. Among other reasons because in the last lines there’s a phrase that’s close to being nonsense and I don’t want to provide food for future critics.

Put the case that seventy years from now a skinny, sallow, graying chap who loves nothing but books leans over the previous page to see if he can discover the nonsense. He reads, rereads, reads again, disjoins the words, takes out a syllable, then another, and another still, and examines the remaining ones inside and out from all sides, up against the light, dusts them off, rubs them against his knee, washes them, and nothing doing. He can’t find the absurdity.

He’s a bibliomaniac. He doesn’t know the author. This name of Brás Cubas doesn’t appear in his biographical dictionaries. He found the volume by chance in the rundown shop of a second-hand book dealer. He bought it for two hundred
réis
. He inquired, investigated, searched about, and came to discover that I was a one-and-only copy … One and only! You people who not only love books but suffer from a mania for them know quite well the value of those words and you can imagine, therefore, my bibliomaniac’s delight. He would reject the crown of the Indies, the Papacy, all the museums of Italy and Holland if he had to trade that one and only copy for them and not because it is that of my
Memoirs
. He would do the same with Laemmert’s
Almanac
if it were a one-and-only copy.

The worst part is the absurdity. The man stays there, hunched over the page, a lens under his right eye, given over completely to the noble and wearing function of deciphering the absurdity. He’s already promised himself to write a brief report in which he will relate the finding of the book and the discovery of the sublimity if there is to be one under that obscure phrase. In the end he discovers nothing and contents himself with ownership. He closes the book, looks at it, looks at it again, goes to the window and holds it up to the sun. A one-and-only copy. At that moment, passing under the window is a Caesar or a Cromwell on the path to power. He turns his back on him, closes the window, lies down in his hammock, and slowly
thumbs through the book, lovingly, wallowing hard … A one-and-only copy!

The absurdity made me lose another chapter. How much better it would have been to have said things smoothly, without all these jolts! I’ve already compared my style to a drunkard’s gait. If the idea seems indecorous to you, let me say that it’s what my meals with Virgília were like in the little house in Gamboa, where we would have our sumptuous feast sometimes, our luncheon. Wine, fruit, compotes. We would eat, it’s true, but it was eating punctuated by loving little words, tender looks, childish acts, an infinity of those side comments of the heart in addition to the real, uninterrupted discourse of love. Sometimes a tiff would come to temper the excessive sweetness of the situation. She would leave me, take refuge in a corner of the settee or go inside to listen to Dona Plácida’s pruderies. Five or ten minutes later we would pick up the thread of our conversation the way I pick up the thread of this narrative to let it unwind again. Let it be noted that far from being horrified at the method, it was our custom to invite it in the person of Dona Plácida, to sit down at the table with us, but Dona Plácida never accepted.

“You don’t seem to like me anymore,” Virgília told her one day.

“Merciful heavens!” the good lady exclaimed, lifting her arms up toward the ceiling. “Not like Iaiá? Who would I ever like in this world then?”

And taking her hands she would look into her eyes, look and look until her eyes watered from staring so hard. Virgília stroked her and I left her a small silver coin in the pocket of her dress.

Never repent for being generous. The little silver coin brought me Dona Plácida’s confidence and, consequently, this chapter. Days later, when I was alone in the house, we began a conversation and she told me her story in brief terms. She was the illegitimate child of a sexton at the cathedral and a woman who sold sweets on the street. She lost her father when she was ten. By then she was shredding cocoanut and doing all kinds of other chores of a sweets-maker fitting for her age. At fifteen or sixteen she married a tailor who died of tuberculosis a while later, leaving her with a daughter two years old and her mother, exhausted from a life of work. She had three mouths to feed. She made sweets, which was her trade, but she also sewed, day and night, assiduously, for three or four shops and she taught some girls in the neighborhood for ten
tostões
a month. The years passed that way, but not her beauty, because she’d never had any. Some courtships, proposals, and seductions came her way, which she resisted.

“If I could have found another husband,” she told me, “I think I would have got married, but nobody wanted to marry me.”

One of the suitors managed to get himself accepted, without being any more genteel than the others, however. Dona Plácida sent him packing and after sending him off wept a great deal. She continued doing sewing for the outside and keeping her pots boiling. Her mother was ill-tempered because of her age and her poverty. She railed at her daughter to take on one of the seasonal, temporary husbands who asked for her. And she would roar:

“Do you think you’re better than me? I don’t know where you get those stuck-up ideas of a rich person. My fine friend, life doesn’t get straightened out just by chance. You can’t eat the wind. What is this? Nice young fellows like Policarpo from the store, poor boy … are you waiting for some nobleman to come along?”

Dona Plácida swore to me that she wasn’t waiting for any nobleman. It was her character. She wanted to be married. She knew quite well that her mother hadn’t been and she knew some women who only had lovers. But it was her character and she wanted to be married. She didn’t want
her daughter to be anything else either. She worked hard, burning her fingers on the stove and her eyes sewing by the candleholder in order to eat and not lose everything. She grew thin, fell ill, lost her mother, buried her with the help of charity, and kept on working. Her daughter was fourteen, but she was very frail and didn’t do anything except flirt with the sharpers who hung around the window grating. Dona Plácida worried a great deal, taking her with her when she had to deliver sewing jobs. The people in the shops stared and winked, convinced that she’d brought her along in order to catch a husband or something else. Some would make bad jokes, pay their respects. The mother began to get offers of money …

She paused for a moment and then went on:

“My daughter ran away. She went off with a fellow, I don’t even want to know about it … She left me alone, but so sad, so sad that I wanted to die. I had nobody else in the world and I was getting old and sick. It was around that time that I got to know Iaiá’s family, good people who gave me something to do and even gave me a home. I was there for several months, a year, over a year, a house servant, sewing. I left when Iaiá got married. Then I lived as God willed it. Look at my fingers, look at these hands …” And she showed her thick, wrinkled hands, the tips of her fingers pricked by needles … “You don’t get this way by chance, sir. God knows how you get this way … Luckily Iaiá took care of me, and you too, doctor … I was afraid of ending up begging on the street …”

As she uttered the last phrase Dona Plácida shuddered. Then, as if recovered, she seemed to be worrying about the impropriety of that confession to the lover of a married woman and she began to laugh, retract, call herself silly, “full of beans,” as her mother used to tell her. Finally, tired of my silence, she left the room. I stayed there staring at my shoetops.

Give the possibility that one of my readers might have skipped the previous chapter, I must observe that it’s necessary to read it in order to understand what I said to myself right after Dona Plácida left the room. What I said was this:

“Well, then, the sexton of the cathedral, assisting at mass one day, saw the lady, who was to be his partner in the creation of Dona Plácida, come in. He saw her on other days, for weeks on end, he liked her, he joshed with her, stepped on her foot as he went up to the altar on feast days. She liked him, they grew close, made love. From that conjunction of empty sensuality Dona Plácida came into bloom. It must be believed that Dona Plácida still couldn’t talk when she was born, but if she could have, she might have said to the authors of her days, “Here I am. Why did you call me?’ And the sacristan and the sacristaness would naturally have answered her, ‘We called you to burn your fingers on pots, your eyes in sewing, to eat poorly or not at all, to go from one place to another in drudgery, getting ill and recovering only to get ill and recover once again, sad now, then desperate, resigned tomorrow, but always with your hands on the pot and your eyes on the sewing until one day you end up in the mire or in the hospital. That’s why we called you in a moment of sympathy.’”