The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (23 page)

What a torture the dinner was! Fortunately, Sabina seated me next to Damasceno’s daughter, a Dona Eulália, or, more familiarly, Nhã-loló, a charming girl, a little bashful at first, but only at the
beginning. She lacked elegance, but she made up for it with her eyes, which were superb and had the only defect of being fixed on me except when they went down to her plate. But Nhã-loló ate so little that she scarcely looked at her meal. Later in the night she sang. Her voice was, as her father had said, “quite lovely.” Nevertheless, I slipped away. Sabina came to the door with me and asked me what I thought of Damasceno’s daughter.

“Nice enough.”

“Quite nice, don’t you think?” she put in. “She needs a little refining, but what a good heart! She’s a pearl. She’d make a good bride for you.”

“I don’t like pearls.”

“Grumpy! When are you going to settle down? When you fall off the tree, when you’re ripe, I know. Well, my fine fellow, whether you want to or not, you’re going to marry Nhã-loló.”

And as she said that she tapped my face with her fingers, light as a dove and at the same time firm and resolute. Good Lord! Could that have been the reason for the reconciliation? I was a bit disconsolate with the idea, but a mysterious voice was calling me to the Lobo Neves house. I said goodbye to Sabina and her threats.

“How’s my darling little mother?” At that word Virgília pouted as always. She was by a window, all alone, looking at the moon, and she greeted me merrily, but when I mentioned our child she pouted. She didn’t like that mention, she was bothered by my anticipated paternal caresses. I, for whom she was now a sacred person, a divine ampulla, left her alone. I imagined at first that the embryo, that unknown figure entering into our adventure, had brought back her sense of sin. I was wrong. Virgília had never seemed more expansive, less reserved, less concerned about other people and her husband. There
was no remorse. I also imagined that the conception might have been nothing but an invention, a way of tying me to her, a recourse that wouldn’t last long and perhaps was beginning to bother her. The hypothesis wasn’t absurd. My sweet Virgília lied sometimes, and so gracefully!

That night I discovered the real reason. It was fear of childbirth and the annoyance of pregnancy. She’d suffered a great deal with the birth of her first child. During that hour made up of minutes of life and minutes of death, she’d experienced the chills of the gallows in her imagination. As for the annoyance, it was complicated all the more by the forced deprivation of certain habits of her elegant life. That must have been it, most certainly. I gave her to understand that, scolding her a little by my rights as a father. Virgília stared at me. She immediately turned her eyes away and smiled in an incredulous way.

Where are they, the flowers of yesteryear? One afternoon, after a few weeks of gestation, the whole structure of my paternal dreams crumbled. The embryo went away at the point when you couldn’t tell Laplace from a turtle. I got the news from the mouth of Lobo Neves, who left me in the parlor and accompanied the doctor to the bedroom of the frustrated mother. I leaned against the window, looking out into the yard where the orange trees were green, with no flowers. Where had they gone, the flowers of yesteryear?

I felt a touch on my shoulder. It was Lobo Neves. We faced each other for a few minutes, mute, inconsolable. I asked about Virgília, then we stayed chatting for half an hour. At the end of that time they brought him a letter. He read it, turned very pale, and folded it with a trembling hand. I think I noticed a movement in him as if he wanted to pounce on me, but I can’t remember too well. What I do remember clearly is that over the following days he greeted me coldly and taciturnly. A few days later in Gamboa, Virgília finally told me everything.

Her husband had shown her the letter as soon as she recovered. It was anonymous and it informed on us. It didn’t say everything. It spoke, for example, of our outside meetings. It limited itself to cautioning him about our intimacy and added that the suspicions were a matter of public knowledge. Virgília read the letter and said with indignation that it was a vile libel.

“Libel?” Lobo Neves asked.

“Vile.”

Her husband took a deep breath, but as he went back to the letter it seemed that every word in it was making a negative sign with its finger, every letter was crying out against his wife’s indignation. That man, otherwise intrepid, was now the most fragile of creatures. Perhaps his imagination was showing him that famous eye of public opinion staring sarcastically at him from a distance with its rascally look. Maybe an invisible voice was repeating into his ear the hints that he’d previously heard or mentioned. He demanded that his wife confess everything to him, because he would forgive her everything. Virgília saw that she was safe. She pretended to be irritated over his insistence, swore that she’d only heard words of jest and courtesy from me. The letter must have been from some luckless suitor. And she named a few—one who’d flirted with her openly for three weeks, another who’d written her a letter, and still others, and others. She gave him their names, the circumstances, studying her husband’s eyes and ended up saying that in order not to give the libel any room she’d treat me in such a way that I wouldn’t be coming back.

I listened to all this a little perturbed, not by the addition of the dissimulation it would be necessary to employ from then on until I kept completely away from the Lobo Neves house, but by Virgília’s moral calm, her lack of upset, fear, memories, and even remorse, Virgília noticed my concern, lifted up my head, because I was staring at the floor then, and told me with a certain bitterness;

“You don’t deserve the sacrifices I’m making for you.”

I didn’t say anything to her. It was useless to have her ponder how a little despair and terror would give our situation the caustic taste of the early days. But if I told her that it could have been possible that, slowly and artificially, she would reach that touch of despair and terror. I didn’t say anything to her. She was tapping the floor nervously with the tip of her shoe. I went over and kissed her on the forehead. Virgília drew back as if it had been the kiss of a dead man.

I can sense that the reader has shuddered—or should have shuddered. Naturally, the last words suggested three or four reflections to him. Take a good look at the picture. In a little house in Gamboa two people who’ve been in love for a long time, one leaning over the other, giving her a kiss on the forehead and the other drawing back as if she felt the contact of the mouth of a corpse. There you have in the short space between mouth and forehead, before the kiss and after it, there you have enough room for a lot of things—the contraction of a resentment—the wrinkle of mistrust—or, finally, the pale and drowsy nose of satiety …

We separated in a happy mood. I dined reconciled with the situation. The anonymous letter was bringing back the salt of mystery and the pepper of danger to our adventure, and in the end it was good that Virgília hadn’t lost her self-control in that crisis. That night I went to the São Pedro Theater. They were putting on a great play in which Estela was bringing out tears. I went in, ran my eyes over the boxes. In one of them I saw Damascene and his family. The daughter was dressed with a new elegance and a certain stylishness, something difficult to explain because the father only earned enough to go into debt. Maybe that was the reason.

I went to visit them during intermission. Damascene greeted me with lots of words, his wife with lots of smiles. As for Nhã-loló, she didn’t take her eyes off me. She seemed prettier to me than at the time of the dinner. I found in her a certain ethereal softness wedded to the polish of earthly forms—a vague expression and worthy of a chapter in which everything must be vague. Really, I don’t know how to tell you, I didn’t feel too bad beside the girl who was done up smartly in a fine dress, a dress that gave me the itching of a Tartuffe. As I contemplated how it chastely and completely covered her knee, I made a subtle discovery, to wit, that nature foresaw human clothing, a condition necessary for the development of our species. Habitual nudity, given the multiplicity of the works and cares of the individual, would tend to dull the senses and retard sex, while clothing, deceiving nature, sharpens and attracts desires, activates them, reproduces them, and, consequently, drives civilization. A blessed custom that gave us Othello and transatlantic packets.

I had an urge to suppress this chapter. This is a slippery slope. But, after all, I’m writing my memoirs and not yours, my peaceable reader. Alongside the charming maiden I seemed to be taken with a double and indefinable feeling. She was the complete expression of Pascal’s duality,
I’ange et la béte
, with the difference that the Jansenist wouldn’t admit the simultaneity of the two natures, while there they were quite together—
I’ange
, who was saying certain heavenly things—and
la béte
, who … No, I am most certainly going to suppress this chapter.

In the orchestra seats I found Lobo Neves chatting with some friends. We spoke superficially, coldly, both constrained. But during the next intermission, with the curtain about to go up, we ran into each other in one of the corridors where there was nobody about. He came over to me with great affability and laughter, pulled me into one of the theatre’s bay windows, and we talked for a long time, mostly he, who seemed the most tranquil of men. I got to ask him about his wife. He answered that she was fine, but then he turned the conversation to general matters, expansive, almost jolly. Whoever wants to can make a guess as to the cause of the difference. I fled from Damascene, who was spying on me from the door of his box.

I didn’t hear any of the second act, neither the words of the actors nor the applause of the audience. Leaning back in my chair I was picking the shreds of my conversation with Lobo Neves out of my memory, re-creating his manners, and I concluded that the new situation was much better. All we needed was Gamboa. Visiting the other house would only sharpen suspicions. We could rigorously go without speaking every day. It was even better, it put the longing during our breaks back into our love. Besides, I was going on forty and I wasn’t anything, not even a district elector. It was urgent that I do something, if only for the love of Virgília, who would be proud to see my name shine … I think that there was loud applause at that moment, but I can’t swear to it. I was thinking about something else.

Multitude, whose love I coveted until death, that was how I got my revenge on you sometimes. I let humankind bustle around my body without hearing them, just as the Prometheus of Aeschylus did with his torturers. Oh, did you try to chain me to the rock of your frivolity, your indifference, or your agitation? Fragile chains, my friends. I would break them with the action of a Gulliver. It’s quite ordinary to go off to ponder in the wilderness. The voluptuous, extraordinary thing is for a man to insulate himself in a sea of gestures and words, of nerves and passions, and declare himself withdrawn, inaccessible, absent. The most they can say when he becomes himself again—that is when he becomes one of the
others—is that he’s come down from the world of the moon. But the world of the moon, that luminous and prudent garret of the brain, what else is it if not the disdainful affirmation of our spiritual freedom? By God, that’s a good way to end a chapter.

If this world weren’t a region of inattentive spirits it wouldn’t be necessary to remind the reader that I’m only attesting to certain laws when, in truth, I possess them. With others I restrict myself to the admission of their probability. An example of the second case is the basis of the present chapter, whose reading I recommend to all people who love the study of social phenomena. It would seem, and it’s not improbable, that there exists between the events of public life and those of private life a certain reciprocal, regular, and perhaps periodic action—or, to use an image, something similar to the tides on the beach in Flamengo and others equally surging. Indeed, when the wave attacks the beach it floods it for several feet inland. But those same waters return to the sea with variable force and go on to form part of the wave about to come and which must return the same as the first. That’s the image. Let’s have a look at its application.

I said elsewhere that Lobo Neves, nominated for president of a province, had turned down the nomination because of the date of the decree, which was the 13th. A serious act whose consequence was the break between the minister and Virgília’s husband. In that way the private event of the evil omen of a number produced the phenomenon of political discord. It remains to be seen how, sometimes afterward, a political event determined a cessation of motion in private life. Since it’s not suitable to the method of this book to describe that other phenomenon immediately, I shall limit myself for now to say that Lobo Neves, four months after our meeting in the theatre, made up with the minister,
a fact that the reader must not lose sight of if he wishes to penetrate the subtlety of my thought.

It was Virgília who gave me the news of her husband’s political about-face one certain October morning between eleven o’clock and noon. She spoke to me about meetings, conversations, a speech …