The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (28 page)

Yes, pleasant Formality, you are the staff of life, the balm of hearts, the mediator among men, the link between heaven and earth. You wipe away the tears of a father, you capture the indulgence of a Prophet. If grief falls asleep and conscience is accommodated, to whom, except you, is that huge benefit owed? The esteem that extends to the hat on one’s head doesn’t say anything to the soul, but the indifference that courts it leaves it with a delightful impression. The reason is that, contrary to an old absurd formula, it isn’t the letter that kills; the letter gives life, the spirit is the object of controversy, of doubt, of interpretation, and consequently of life and death. You live, pleasant Formality, for the peace of Damasceno and the glory of Mohammed.

And take good notice that I saw the Turkish print two years after Damasceno’s words and I saw it in the Chamber of Deputies, in the midst of a great hubbub while a deputy was discussing an opinion of the budget commission, for I was also a deputy. For those who’ve read
this book there’s no need to discuss my satisfaction further, and for the others it’s equally useless. I was a deputy and I saw the Turkish print as I leaned back in my seat between a colleague who was telling a story and another who was sketching the profile of the speaker in pencil on the back of an envelope. The speaker was Lobo Neves. The wave of life had brought us to the same beach like two bottles from shipwrecked sailors, he holding in his resentment, I holding in my remorse perhaps. And I use that suspensive, doubtful, or conditional form meaning to say that there was nothing to be held there unless it was my ambition to be a cabinet minister.

I had no remorse. If I had the proper chemical apparatus, I would include a page of chemistry in this book because I would break down remorse into its most simple elements with an aim to knowing in a positive and conclusive way the reason for Achilles’ dragging the corpse of his adversary around the walls of Troy and Lady Macbeth’s walking about the room with her spot of blood. But I don’t have any chemical apparatus, just as I didn’t have any remorse. What I had was the desire to be a minister of state. Therefore, if I am to finish this chapter, I must say that I didn’t want to be either Achilles or Lady Macbeth, and that if I had to be either one, better Achilles, better dragging the corpse in triumph than carrying the spot. Priam’s pleas are finally heard and a nice military and literary reputation is gained. I wasn’t listening to Priam’s pleas but to Lobo Neves’ speech, and I had no remorse.

The first time I was able to speak to Virgília after the presidency was at a ball in 1855. She was wearing a superb gown of blue grosgrain and was displaying the same pair of shoulders as in previous times. It wasn’t the freshness of her early years, quite the contrary, but she was still beautiful, with an autumnal beauty enhanced by the night. I remember that we talked a lot without referring to anything out of the past. Everything was understood. A remote, vague comment or a look, perhaps, and nothing else. A short while later she left. I went to watch her go down the steps and I don’t know by what means of cerebral ventriloquism (I beg the forgiveness of philologists for this barbarous expression) I murmured to myself the profoundly retrospective word:

“Magnificent!”

This chapter should be inserted between the first and second sentences of
Chapter CXXIX
.

Just after I had said that to myself through the ventriloquo-cerebral process—or what was simple opinion and not remorse—I felt someone put his hand on my shoulder. I turned. It was an old friend, a naval officer, jovial, impudent in his manners. He smiled maliciously and said to me:

“You old devil! Memories of the past, eh?”

“Hurray for the past!”

“You’ve got your old job back, naturally.”

“Easy, you rogue!” I told him, wagging my finger at him.

I must confess that the dialogue was an indiscretion—principally my last response. And I confess it with so much greater pleasure because women are the ones who have the fame of being indiscreet and I don’t wish to end the book without setting that notion of the human spirit straight. In matters of amorous adventures I have found men who smiled or had trouble denying it, in a cold way, with monosyllables, and so forth, while their female equivalents wouldn’t admit it and would swear by the Holy Gospels that it was all calumny. The reason for this difference is that women (excepting the hypothesis in Chapter CI and other hypotheses) surrender out of love, whether it be either Stendhal’s love-passion, or the purely physical love of certain Roman ladies, for example, or Polynesian, Laplander, Kaffir, and possibly those of other civilized races. But men—I speak of men belonging to an elegant and cultured society—men couple their vanity to the other sentiment. In addition to that (and I’m still referring to forbidden cases) women, when they love another man, think they’re betraying a duty and therefore must conceal it with the greatest skill, must refine the perfidy, while men, enjoying their being the cause of the infraction and the victory over the other man as well, are legitimately proud and immediately pass on to that other less harsh and less secret sentiment—that fine fatuousness that is the luminous sweat of merit.

But whether my explanation is true or not, it’s sufficient for me to leave written on this page for the use of the ages that the indiscretion of women is a trick invented by men. In love, at least, they’re as silent as the tomb. They’ve been ruined many times by being clumsy, restless, unable to stand up in the face of looks and gestures, and that’s why a great lady and delicate spirit, the Queen of Navarre, somewhere employed a metaphor to say that all amorous adventures will of necessity be discovered sooner or later: “There is no puppy so well trained that we do not hear its bark in the end.”

By quoting the Queen of Navarre’s remark, it occurs to me that among our people when a person sees another irritated, it’s customary to ask him: “Say, who killed your puppies?” as if to say, “Who exposed your love affair, your secret adventure, etc.” But this chapter isn’t serious.

We were at the point where the naval officer got the confession of my affair with Virgília out of me and here I will improve on Helvetius’ principle—or if not, I’ll explain it. It was in my interest to keep quiet. To confirm the suspicions of an old thing was to arouse some forgotten hate, give rise to a scandal, at most to acquire the reputation of an indiscreet person. It was in my interest and if I understand Helvetius’ principle in a superficial way, that’s what I should have done. But I’ve already given the reasons for masculine indiscretion: before that interest in
security
there was another, that of
pride
, which is more intimate, more immediate. The first was reflexive, with the supposition of a previous syllogism. The second was spontaneous, instinctive, it came from the subject’s insides. Finally, the first had a remote effect, the second a close one. Conclusion: Helvetius’ principle is true in my case. The difference is that it wasn’t a case of apparent interests but the hidden ones.

I still haven’t told you—but I’ll say it now—that when Virgília was going down the steps and the naval officer touched me on the shoulder, I was fifty years old. It was, therefore, my life that was going downstairs—or the best part of it at least, a part full of pleasures, agitations, frights—disguised with dissimulation and duplicity—but, all in all, the best if we must speak in the usual terms. If, however, we employ other, more sublime ones, the best part was what remained, as I shall have the honor of telling you in the few pages left in this book.

Fifty! It wasn’t necessary to confess it. You’re already getting the feeling that my style isn’t as nimble as it was during the early days. On that occasion, when the conversation with the naval officer came to an end and he put on his cape and left, I must confess that I was left a bit sad. I went back to the main room. I felt like dancing a polka, being intoxicated by the lights, the flowers, the chandeliers, the pretty eyes, and the quiet and sprightly bubble of individual conversations. And I’m not sorry. I was rejuvenated. But a half hour later, when I left the ball at four in the morning, what did I find inside the coach? My fifty years. There they were, insistent, not numb from the cold, not rheumatic—but dozing off from fatigue, a little longing for bed and rest. Then—and just look to what point the imagination of a sleepy man can reach—then I seemed to hear from a bat who was climbing up the roof of the vehicle: Mr. Brás Cubas, the rejuvenation was in the room, the chandeliers, the lights, the silk—in short, in other people.

And now I have the feeling that if some lady has followed along these pages she closes the book and doesn’t read the rest. For her, the interest in my love, which was love, has died out. Fifty years old! It isn’t invalidism yet, but it’s no longer sprightliness. With ten more years I’ll understand what an Englishman once said, I’ll understand that “it’s a matter of not finding anyone who remembers my parents and the way in which I must face my own
OBLIVION
.”

Put that name in small caps.
OBLIVION
! It’s only proper that all honor be paid to a personage so despised and so worthy, a last-minute guest at the party, but a sure one. The lady who dazzled at the dawn of the present reign knows it and, even more painfully, the one who displayed her charms in bloom during the Paraná ministry, because the latter is closer to triumph and she is already beginning to feel that others have taken her carriage. So if she’s true to herself she won’t persist in a dead or expiring memory. She won’t seek in the looks of today the same greeting as in yesterday’s looks, when it was others who took part in the march of life with a merry heart and a swift foot.
Tempora mutantur
. She understands that this whirlwind is like that, it carries off the leaves of the forest and the rags of the road without exception or mercy. And if she has a touch of philosophy she won’t envy but will feel sorry for the ones who have taken her carriage because they, too, will be helped down by the footman
OBLIVION
. A spectacle whose purpose is to amuse the planet Saturn, which is quite bored with it.

But, I’m either mistaken or I’ve just written a useless chapter.

Not really. It sums up the reflections I made to Quincas Borba the following day, adding that I felt downhearted and a thousand other sad things. But that philosopher, with the elevated good sense he had at his disposal, shouted at me that I was sliding down the fatal slope of melancholy.

“My dear Brás Cubas, don’t let yourself be overcome by those vapors. Good Lord! You’ve got to be a man! Be strong! Fight! Conquer! Dominate! Fifty is the age of science and government. Courage, Brás Cubas. Don’t turn fool on me. What have you got to do with that succession from ruin to ruin, from flower to flower? Try to savor life. And be aware that the worst philosophy is that of the weeper who lies down on the riverbank to mourn the incessant flow of the waters. Their duty is never to stop. Make an adjustment to the law and try to take advantage of it.”

The value of the authority of a great philosopher is found in the smallest things. Quincas Borba’s words had the special virtue of shaking me out of the moral and mental torpor I was caught up in. Let’s get to it. Let’s get into the government, it’s time. Up till then I hadn’t participated in the great debates. I was courting a minister’s portfolio by means of flattery, teas, commissions, and votes. And the portfolio never came. It was urgent that I make a speech.

I began slowly. Three days later during the discussion of the budget for the ministry of justice, I took advantage of an opening to ask the minister modestly if it wouldn’t be useful to reduce the size of the National Guard’s shakos. The object of the question wasn’t far-reaching, but even so I demonstrated how it wasn’t unworthy of the cogitations of a statesman and I cited Philopaemen, who ordered the replacement of his troops’ shields, which were small, by other larger ones, and also their spears, which were too light, a fact that history didn’t find out of line with the gravity of its pages. The size of our shakos called for a profound cut, not only to make them more stylish, but also to make them more hygienic. On parade in the sun the excessive heat they produce could be fatal. Since it was a well-known fact that it was a precept of Hippocrates that a person should keep his head cool, it seemed cruel to oblige a citizen, from the simple consideration of being in uniform, to risk his health and his life and, consequently, the future of his family. The chamber and the government should keep in mind that the National Guard is the rampart of freedom and independence, and that a citizen called up for service freely given, frequent, and arduous, had the right to have the onus of it lessened by a decree calling for a light and easy-fitting uniform. I added that the shako, because of its weight, lowered a citizen’s head, and the nation needed citizens whose brow could be raised, proud and serene, in the face of power. And I concluded with this idea: the weeping willow, which bends its branches toward the earth, is a graveyard tree. The palm tree, erect and firm, is a tree of the wilderness, public squares, and gardens.