The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (5 page)

“What kind of ideas are those?” Virgília interrupted me, a little annoyed. “Look, I’m not going to come back. Dying! We all have to die. It’s enough just being alive.”

And looking at the clock:

“Good heavens! It’s three o’clock. I’ve got to go.”

“So soon?”

“Yes. I’ll come back tomorrow or sometime later.”

“I don’t know if you’re doing the proper thing,” I replied. “The patient is an old bachelor and the house has no women in it…”

“What about your sister?”

“She’s going to come and spend a few days here, but she can’t get here until Saturday.”

Virgília thought for a moment, straightened up, and said gravely:

“I’m an old woman! Nobody pays any attention to me anymore. But just to put an end to any doubts I’ll come with Nhonhô.”

Nhonhô was a lawyer, the only child from her marriage, who at the age of five had been the unwitting accomplice in our love affair. They came together two days later and I must confess that when I saw them there in my bedroom I was taken by a reticence that prevented me from replying immediately to the lad’s affable words, Virgília sensed this and told her son:

“Nhonhô, don’t pay any attention to that big trickster there. He doesn’t want to talk so he can make you think that he’s at death’s door.’

Her son smiled. I think I smiled, too, and everything ended up as a big joke. Virgília was serene and smiling. She had the look of immaculate life. No suspect look, no gesture that might have given anything away, a balance in word and spirit, control over herself, all of which seemed—and perhaps was—strange. As by chance we touched upon an illicit love affair, half-secret, half-known, I saw her speak a disdainful word and a bit indignantly about the woman involved, a friend of hers besides. Her son felt satisfied when he heard that strong and fitting word and I asked myself what the hawks might have said about us humans if Buffon had been born a hawk …

It was the start of my delirium.

As far as I know, no one has ever spoken about his own delirium. I’m doing just that and science will thank me for it. If the reader isn’t given to the contemplation of these mental phenomena, he may skip this chapter and go straight to the narrative. But if he has the slightest bit of curiosity, I can tell him now that it’s interesting to know what went on in ray head for some twenty or thirty minutes.

At the very first I took on the figure of a Chinese barber, potbellied, dexterous, who was giving a close shave to a mandarin, who paid me for my work with pinches and sweets: the whims of a mandarin.

Right after that I felt myself transformed into Aquinas’
Summa Theologca
, printed in one volume and morocco-bound, with silver clasps and illustrations. This was an idea that gave my body a most complete immobility and even now I can remember that with my hands as the book’s clasps crossed over my stomach, someone was uncrossing them (Virgília most certainly) because that position gave her the image of a dead person.

Finally, restored to human form, I saw a hippopotamus come and carry me off. I let myself go, silent, I don’t know whether out of fear or trust, but after a short while the running became so dizzying that I dared question him and in some way told him that the trip didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“You’re wrong,” the animal replied, “we’re going to the origin of the centuries.”

I suggested that it must be very far away, but the hippopotamus either didn’t understand me or didn’t hear me, unless he was pretending one of those things, and when I asked him, since he could talk, if he were a descendant of Achilles’ horse or Balaam’s ass, he answered me with a gesture peculiar to those two quadrupeds, he flapped his ears. For my part, I closed my eyes and let myself go where chance would take me. I must confess now, however, that I felt some sort of prick of curiosity to find out where the origin of the centuries was, if it was as mysterious as the origin of the Nile, and, most of all, whether the consummation of those same centuries was really worth anything: the reflections of a sick mind. Since I was going along with my eyes closed I couldn’t see the road. I can only remember that a feeling of cold grew stronger as the journey went on and that a time came when it seemed to me that we were entering the region of perpetual ice. In fact, I opened my eyes and saw that my animal was galloping across a white plain of snow, here and there a mountain of snow, vegetation of snow, and several large animals of snow. Everything’ snow. A sun of snow was coming out to freeze us. I tried to speak but all I could manage was to grunt this anxious question:

“Where are we?”

“We just passed Eden.”

“Fine. Let’s stop at Abraham’s tent.”

“But we’re traveling backward!” my mount retorted mockingly.

I was vexed and confused. The trip was beginning to seem tiresome and reckless, the cold was uncomfortable, the ride furious, and the result impalpable. And afterward—the cogitations of a sick man—if we did reach the indicated goal, it wasn’t impossible that the centuries, annoyed at having their origin infringed upon, would squash me between their fingers, which must have been as age-old as they. While I was thinking along those lines we were gobbling up the road and the plain flew under our feet until the animal became fatigued and I was able to look more calmly at my surroundings. Only look: I saw nothing except the vast whiteness of the snow, which by now had invaded the sky itself, blue up till then. Here and there a plant or two might appear, huge and brutish, the broad leaves waving in the wind. The silence of that region was like a tomb. It could be said that the life of things had become stupidity for man.

Had it fallen out of the air? Detached itself from the earth? I don’t know. I do know that a huge shape, the figure of a woman, appeared to me then, staring at me with eyes that blazed like the sun. Everything about that figure had the vastness of wild forms and everything was beyond the comprehension of human gaze because the outlines were lost in the surroundings and what looked thick was often diaphanous. Stupefied, I didn’t say a word, I couldn’t even let out a cry, but after a time, which was brief, I asked who she was and what her name was: the curiosity of delirium.

“Call me Nature or Pandora. I am your mother and your enemy.”

When I heard that last word I drew back a little, overcome by fear. The figure let out a guffaw, which produced the effect of a typhoon around us; plants twisted and a long moan broke the silence of external things.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said, “my enmity doesn’t kill, it’s confirmed most of all by life. You’re alive: that’s the only torment I want.”

“I’m alive?” I asked, digging my nails into my hands as if to certify my existence.

“Yes, worm, you’re alive. Don’t worry about losing those rags that are your pride, you’re still going to taste the bread of pain and the wine of misery for a few hours. You’re alive. Right now while you’re going crazy, you’re alive, and if your consciousness gets an instant of wisdom, you’ll say you want to live.”

Saying that, the vision reached out her arm, grabbed me by the hair, and lifted me up as if I were a feather. Only then did I manage to get a close look at her face, which was enormous. Nothing more serene; no
violent contortion, no expression of hatred or ferocity. The only expression, general, complete, was that of selfish impassivity, that of eternal deafness, that of an immovable will. Wrath, if she had any, was buried in her heart. At the same time, in that face of glacial expression there was a look of youth and a blend of strength and vitality before which I felt the weakest and most decrepit of creatures.

“Did you understand me?” she asked me after some time of mutual contemplation.

“No,” I answered, “nor do I want to understand you. You’re an absurdity, you’re a fable. I’m dreaming most certainly or if it’s true that I went mad, you’re nothing but the conception of a lunatic. I mean a hollow thing that absent reason can’t control or touch. You Nature? The Nature I know is only mother and not enemy. She doesn’t make life a torment, nor does she, like you, carry a face that’s as indifferent as the tomb. And why Pandora?”

“Because I carry good and evil in my bag and the greatest thing of all, hope, the consolation of mankind. Are you trembling?”

“Yes, your gaze bewitches me.”

“I should think so, I’m not only life, I’m also death, and you’re about to give me back what I loaned you. You great lascivious man, the voluptuosity of nothingness awaits you.”

When that word, “nothingness,” echoed like a thunderclap in that huge valley, it was like the last sound that would reach my ears. I seemed to feel my own sudden decomposition. Then I faced her with pleading eyes and asked for a few more years.

“You miserable little minute!” she exclaimed. “What do you want a few more instants of life for? To devour and be devoured afterward? Haven’t you had enough spectacle and struggle? You’ve had more than enough of what I presented you with that’s the least base or the least painful: the dawn of day, the melancholy of afternoon, the stillness of night, the aspects of the land, sleep, which when all’s said and done is the greatest benefit my hands can give. What more do you want, you sublime idiot?”

“Just to live, that’s all I ask of you. Who put this love of life in my heart if not you? And since I love life why must you hurt yourself by killing me?”

“Because I no longer need you. The minute that passes doesn’t matter to time, only the minute that’s coming. The minute that’s coming is strong, merry, it thinks it carries eternity in itself and it carries death, and it perishes just like the other one, but time carries on. Selfishness,
you say? Yes, selfishness, I have no other law. Selfishness, preservation. The jaguar kills the calf because the jaguar’s reasoning is that it must live, and if the calf is tender, so much the better: that’s the universal law. Come up and have a look.”

Saying that, she carried me up to the top of a mountain. I cast my eyes down one of the slopes and for a long time, in the distance, through the mist I contemplated a strange and singular thing. Just imagine, reader, a reduction of the centuries and a parade of all of them, all races, all passions, the tumult of empires, the war of appetites and hates, the reciprocal destruction of creatures and things. Such was that spectacle, a harsh and curious spectacle. The history of man and the earth had an intensity in that way that neither science nor imagination could give it, because science is slower and imagination is vaguer, while what I was seeing there was the living condensation of all ages. In order to describe it one would have to make a lightning bolt stand still. The centuries were filing by in a maelstrom and yet, because the eyes of delirium are different, I saw everything that was passing before me—torments and delights—from that thing called glory to the other one called misery, and I saw love multiplying misery and I saw misery intensifying weakness. Along came greed that devours, wrath that inflames, envy that drools, and the hoe and the pen, damp with sweat and ambition, hunger, vanity, melancholy, wealth, love, and all of them shaking man like a rattle until they destroyed him like a rag. They were different forms of an illness that sometimes gnaws at the entrails, sometimes at thoughts, and in its Harlequin costume eternally stalks the human species. Pain relents sometimes, but it gives way to indifference, which is a dreamless sleep, or to pleasure, which is a bastard pain. Then man, whipped and rebellious, ran ahead of the fatality of things after a nebulous and dodging figure made of remnants, one remnant of the impalpable, another of the improbable, another of the invisible, all sewn together with a precarious stitch by the needle of imagination. And that figure—nothing less than the chimera of happiness—either runs away from him perpetually or lets itself be caught by the hem, and man would clutch it to his breast, and then she would laugh, mockingly, and disappear like an illusion.

As I contemplated such calamity I was unable to hold back a cry of anguish that Nature or Pandora heard without protest or laughter. And, I don’t know by what law of cerebral upset, I was the one who started to laugh—an arrhythmic and idiotic laugh.

“You’re right,” I said, “this is amusing and worth something—monotonous maybe, but worth something. When Job cursed the day he was conceived it was because he wanted to see the spectacle from up here on top. Come on, Pandora, open up your womb and digest me. It’s amusing, but digest me.”

Her answer was to force me to look down below and watch the centuries that were still passing, swift and turbulent, the generations that were superimposed on generations, some sad like the Hebrews of the Captivity, others merry like Commodus’ profligates, and all of them punctual for the tomb. I tried to flee but a mysterious force held back my feet. Then I said to myself: “Fine, the centuries keep passing, mine will arrive and it will pass, too, right down to the last one, which will decipher eternity for me.” And I fixed my gaze on them and continued watching the ages, which kept coming and passing, calm and resolute now. I don’t know, but I may even have been happy. Happy perhaps. Each century brought its portion of light and shadow, apathy and combat, truth and error, and its cortège of systems, new ideas, new illusions. In each of them the greenery of a springtime was bursting forth, and then they would yellow, to be rejuvenated later on. So in that way life had the regularity of a calendar, history and civilization were being made, and man, naked and unarmed, armed himself and dressed; built hovel and palace, a crude village and Thebes of a Thousand Gates; created science that scrutinizes and art that elevates; made himself orator, mechanic, philosopher, covered the face of the globe; descended into the bowels of the Earth; climbed up to the sphere of the clouds, collaborating in that way in the mysterious work with which he mitigated the necessities of life and the melancholy of abandonment. My gaze, bored and distracted, finally saw the present century arrive, and behind it the future ones. It came along agile, dexterous, vibrant, self-confident, a little diffuse, bold, knowledgeable, but in the end as miserable as the ones before, and so it passed, and that was how the others passed, with the same rapidity and the same monotony. I redoubled my attention, sharpened my sight. I was finally going to see the last—the last! But by then the speed of the march was such that it went beyond all comprehension. At its base a lightning flash would have been a century. Maybe that was why objects began to change. Some grew, others shrank, others were lost in their background. A mist covered everything—except the hippopotamus who had brought me there and who, likewise, began to grow smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until he reached the size of a cat. In fact he was a cat. I took a good look at him.
It was my cat, Sultão, who was playing by the door of the room with a ball of paper.