The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (21 page)

That same day, trying to prepare people’s ideas, I began to bandy it about that I might be going north as provincial secretary in order to fulfill certain political designs of my own. I said so on the Rua do Ouvidor and repeated it the following day at the Pharoux and at the theater. Some people, tying my nomination to Lobo Neves’, which was already rumored, smiled maliciously, others patted me on the back. At the theatre a lady told me that it was carrying a love of sculpture a bit far. She was referring to Virgília’s beautiful figure.

But the most open allusion I received was at Sabina’s three days later. It was made by a certain Garcez, an old surgeon, tiny, trivial, and a babbler who was capable of reaching the age of seventy, eighty, or ninety without ever having acquired the austere bearing that marks the gentility of the aged. A ridiculous old age is perhaps nature’s saddest and final surprise.

“I know, this time you’re going to read Cicero,” he told me when he heard of the trip.

“Cicero?” Sabina exclaimed.

“What else? Your brother is a great Latinist. He can translate Virgil at sight. Note that it’s Virgil and not Virgília … don’t confuse them …”

And he laughed, a gross, vulgar, frivolous laugh. Sabina looked at me, fearful of some reply. But she smiled when she saw me smile and turned her face to hide it. The other people looked at me with expressions of curiosity, indulgence, and sympathy. It was quite obvious that they hadn’t heard anything new. The matter of my love affair was more
public than I could have imagined. Nevertheless, I smiled a quick, fugitive, swallowing smile—chattering like the Sintra magpies. Virgília was a beautiful mistake, and it’s so easy to confess a beautiful mistake! At first I was accustomed to scowl when I heard some reference to our love affair, but—word of honor—inside I had a warm and flattered feeling. Once, however, I happened to smile and I continued doing so on other occasions. I don’t know if there’s anyone who can explain the phenomenon. I explain it this way: in the beginning the contentment, being inner, was, in a manner of speaking, that same smile but only a bud. With the passage of time the flower bloomed and appeared for the eyes of others. A simple matter of botany.

Cotrim drew me out of that pleasure, leading me to the window. “Do you mind if I tell you something?” he asked. “Don’t take that trip. It’s unwise, it’s dangerous.”

“Why?”

“You know very well why,” he replied. “It’s dangerous especially, quite dangerous. Here in the capital a matter like that gets lost in the mass of people and interests. But in the provinces it takes on a different shape. And since it’s a question of political people, it really is unwise. The opposition newspapers, as soon as they sniff out the business, will proceed to print it in block letters, and out of that will come the jokes, the remarks, the nicknames …”

“But I don’t understand …”

“You understand, you understand. Really, you wouldn’t be much of a friend of ours if you denied what everybody knows. I’ve known about it for months. I repeat, don’t take a trip like that. Bear up under her absence, which is better, and avoid any great scandal and greater displeasure …”

He said that and went inside. I remained there looking at the street light on the corner—an old oil lamp—sad, obscure, and curved, like a question mark. What was I to do? It was Hamlet’s case, either to suffer fortune’s slings and arrows or fight against them and subdue them. In other words, to sail or not to sail. That was the question. The street light wasn’t telling me anything. Cotrim’s words were echoing in the ears of my memory in quite a different way from those of Garcez. Maybe Cotrim was right. But would I be able to separate from Virgília?

Sabina came over and asked me what I was thinking about. Nothing, I answered, that I was sleepy and was going home. Sabina was silent for a moment. “I know what you need. It’s a girlfriend. Let me arrange a girlfriend for you.” I left there oppressed, disoriented. Everything ready for sailing—heart and soul—arid that gatekeeper of social rules appears and asks me for my card of admission. I said to hell with social rules and along with them the constitution, the legislative body, the ministry, everything.

The next day I open a political newspaper and read that by a decree dated the 13th Lobo Neves and I had been named president and secretary of the Province of ***. I immediately wrote to Virgília and two hours later went to Gamboa. Poor Dona Plácida! She was getting more and more upset. She asked me if we were going to forget our old lady, if our absence would be for long and if the province was far away. I consoled her, but I needed consolation myself. Cotrim’s objections were bothering me. Virgília arrived a short time later, lively as a swallow, but when she saw that I was downcast she got serious.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t know if I should accept.”

Virgília dropped onto the settee laughing. “Why not?” she asked.

“It’s not proper. It’s too obvious …”

“But we’re not going anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

She told me that her husband had turned down the nomination and for reasons that he only told her, charging her to the greatest secrecy. He couldn’t admit it to anyone else. “It’s childish,” he observed, “ridiculous, but in the end for me it’s a powerful reason.” He told me that the decree was dated the 13th and that that number carried a mournful memory for him. His father had died on the 13th, thirteen days after a dinner where thirteen people had been present. The house in which his mother died was Number 13. Etc. It was a fateful figure. He couldn’t admit such a thing to the minister. He would tell him that he had personal
reasons for not accepting. I was left as the reader must be—a little startled at that sacrifice to a number, but since he was an ambitious man the sacrifice must have been sincere …

Fateful number, can you remember how many times I blessed you? That, too, must have been the way the red-haired virgins of Thebes blessed the mare with a russet mane that took their place in Pelopidas’ sacrifice—a charming mare who died there covered with flowers without anyone’s ever having given her a word of fond remembrance. Well, I give you one, pitiful mare, not only because of the death you suffered but because among the spared maidens it’s not impossible that a grandmother of the Cubases figured … Fateful number, you were our salvation. Her husband didn’t confess the reason for his refusal to me. He told me, too, that it was because of personal business and the serious, convinced face with which I listened to him did honor to human hypocrisy. He was the only one who had trouble covering up the sadness eating at him. He spoke little, was self-absorbed, stayed home reading. On other occasions he would receive and then he would converse and laugh a lot, with noise and affection. Two things were oppressing him—ambition, which had had its wings clipped by a scruple and immediately following doubt and perhaps regret, but a regret that would return if the hypothesis were repeated, because the superstitious basis still existed. He had his doubts about the superstition without arriving at its rejection. That persistence of a feeling that was repugnant to the individual himself was a phenomenon worthy of some attention. But I preferred that she couldn’t bear seeing a toad turned on its back.

“What is there about that?” I asked her.

“It’s evil,” was her answer.

Only that, the single answer that was worth as much as the book with seven seals for her. It’s evil. They’d told her that when she was a child with no other explanation and she was content with the certainty of harm. The same thing happened when there was talk of pointing at a star. That she knew perfectly well could cause a wart.

A wart or anything else, what was that to someone who’d lost the presidency of a province? A gratuitous or cheap superstition can be tolerated. What cannot be is one that carries away part of your life. That was the case with Lobo Neves along with doubt and the terror of having been ridiculous. And the added fact that the minister hadn’t believed in any personal reasons. He attributed Lobo Neves’ refusal to political maneuvers, a complicated illusion because of certain aspects. He treated him shabbily, conveyed his lack of trust to colleagues. Incidents arose. Finally, with time, the resigned president went over to the opposition.

A person who has escaped a danger loves life with new intensity. I began to love Virgília even more ardently after being on the brink of losing her and the same things happened with her. In that way the presidency had only given new life to our original affection. It was the drug with which we made our love more delightful and also more esteemed. During the first days following that episode we entertained ourselves by imagining the pain of separation had there been a separation, how sad we both would have been, how far the sea would have stretched out between us like an elastic cloth. And just as children snuggle up to their mother’s breast to escape a simple scowl, we fled the imagined danger by squeezing each other with hugs.

“My wonderful Virgília!”

“My love!”

“You’re mine, aren’t you?”

“Yours, yours …”

And thus we picked up the thread of our adventure the same as the Sultaness Scheherezade had done with the thread of her stories. That was, to my mind, the high point of our love, the summit of the mountain from where, for a time, we could make out the valleys to the east and west and the tranquil blue sky above us. Having rested for that time, we began to descend the slope, holding hands or apart, but descending, descending …

As I perceived her to be somewhat different on the way down, I don’t know whether downcast or something else, I asked her what was wrong. She was silent, with an expression of annoyance, upset, fatigue. I persisted and she told me that … A thin fluid ran through my whole body, a strong, quick, singular sensation that I’ll never be able to put down on paper. I grasped her hands, pulling her softly to me, and kissed her on the brow with the solemnity of Abraham. She shuddered, took my head between her hands, stared into my eyes, then stroked me with a maternal gesture … There’s a mystery there. Let’s give the reader time to decipher that mystery.

A disaster occurred around that time: the death of Viegas. Viegas had passed through by chance, his seventy years oppressed by asthma, disjointed by rheumatism, and a damaged heart to boot. He was one of the delicate observers of our adventure. Virgília nourished great hopes that this old relative, avaricious as a tomb, would protect her son’s future by means of some legacy. And if her husband had similar thoughts he covered them or choked them off. Everything must be told: there was a certain fundamental dignity in Lobo Neves, a layer of rock that resisted dealings with people. The others, the outer layers, loose earth and sand, had been brought to him by life in its perpetual overflow. If the reader remembers
Chapter XXIII
he will observe that this is the second time I’ve compared life to an overflow, but he must also notice that this time I add an adjective: perpetual. And God knows the strength of an adjective, above all in young, hot countries.

What’s new to this book is Lobo Neves’ moral, geology, and probably that of the gentleman reading me. Yes, these layers of character that life alters, preserves, or dissolves according to their resistance, these layers deserve a chapter that I’m not going to write so as not to make the narration too long. I’m only going to say that the most honest man I ever met in my life was a certain Jacó Medeiros or Jacó Valadares, I can’t remember his name too well. Maybe it was Jacó Rodrigues, in any case, Jacó. He was probity personified. He could have been rich by going counter to the tiniest scruple and he refused. He let no less than four hundred
cantos
slip through his fingers. His probity was so exemplary that it got to be punctilious and wearisome. One day as we were alone together at his place in the midst of a pleasant chat they came to tell him that Doctor B., a boring fellow, was looking for him. Jacó told them to say he wasn’t at home.

“It won’t work,” a voice roared in the hallway, “because I’m already inside.”

And, indeed, it was Doctor B. who appeared at the parlor door. Jacó got up to receive him, stating that he’d thought it was someone else, not he, adding that he was very pleased with his visit, which subjected us to
an hour and a half of deadly boredom and no more because Jacó took out his watch. Doctor B then asked him if he was going out.

“With my wife,” Jacó answered.

Doctor B. left and we gave a sign of relief. Once we got through with our sighing, I told Jacó that he’d just lied four times in less than two hours. The first time by contradicting himself, the second by showing happiness at the presence of the intruder, the third by saying that he was going out, the fourth by adding that it was with his wife. Jacó reflected for a moment, then confessed the accuracy of my observation, but he defended himself by saying that absolute veracity was incompatible with an advanced social state and that the peace of cities could only be obtained at the cost of reciprocal deceits … Ah! Now I remember. His name was Jacó Tavares.

Needless to say, I refuted such a pernicious doctrine with the most elementary arguments, but he was so annoyed with my observation that he resisted to the end, displaying a certain fictitious heat, perhaps in order to confuse his conscience.

Virgília’s case was a bit more serious. She was less scrupulous than her husband. She openly showed the hope she had for the legacy, showering her relative with all manner of courtesies, attentions, and allurements that could bring on a codicil at the very least. Properly speaking, she flattered him, but I have observed that women’s flattery is not the same as that of men. The latter tends toward servility, the former is mingled with affection. The gracefully curved figure, the honeyed word, their very physical weakness give women’s flattery a local hue, a legitimate look. The age of the one being flattered doesn’t matter. A woman will always have a certain air of mother or sister for his—or even that of
a nurse, another feminine position in which the most skillful of men will always lack a
quid
, a fluid, something.