The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (6 page)

The reader has already come to see that it was Reason returning home and inviting Folly to leave, proclaiming with perfect right Tartuffe’s words:

La maison est à moi, c’est à vous d’en sortir
.

But it’s an old quirk of Folly’s to develop a love of other people’s houses, so that no sooner is she mistress of one than it’s difficult to make her clear out. It’s a quirk. There’s no getting rid of her. She was hardened to shame a long time ago. Now, if we take note of the huge number of houses she occupies—some permanently, others during their periods of calm—we will conclude that this affable wanderer is the terror of householders. In our case there was almost a commotion at the door to my brain because the intruder didn’t want to relinquish the house and the owner wouldn’t give up her intention of taking what was hers. In the end Folly contented herself with a small corner of the attic.

“No, ma’am,” Reason replied. “I’m tired of letting you have attics, sick and tired. What you’re after is to move quietly from attic to dining room, from there to the living room and everywhere else.”

“All right, just let me stay a little while longer. I’m on the trail of a mystery…”

“What mystery?”

“Two of them,” Folly corrected. “That of life and that of death. I’m only asking you for ten minutes.”

Reason began to laugh.

“You’ll always be the same … always the same … always the same …”

And so saying Reason grabbed Folly by the wrists and dragged her outside. Then she went in and closed the door. Folly still moaned some entreaties, growled some curses, but she soon gave up, stuck out her tongue as a jeer, and went on her way …

And now watch the skill, the art with which I make the greatest transition in this book. Watch. My delirium began in Virgília’s presence. Virgília was the great sin of my youth. There’s no youth without childhood, childhood presumes birth, and here is how we come, effortlessly, to that day of October 20, 1805, on which I was born. See? Seamlessly, nothing to divert the reader’s calm attention, nothing. So the book goes on like this with all of method’s advantages but without method’s rigidity. It was about time. Because this business of method, being something indispensable, is better still if it comes without a necktie or suspenders, but, rather, a little cool and loose, like someone who doesn’t care about the woman next door or the policeman on the block. It’s like eloquence, because there’s one kind that’s genuine and vibrant, with a natural and fascinating art, and another that’s stiff, sticky, and stale. Let’s get along to October 20th.

On that day the family tree of the Cubases blossomed with a delicate flower. I was born. I was received in the arms of Pascoela, the celebrated midwife from Minho, who boasted of having opened the door to the world for a whole generation of aristocrats. It’s possible that my father had heard that declaration, but I think that paternal feeling was what induced him to show her his gratification with two half-doubloons. Washed and swathed, I immediately became the hero of our house. Everybody predicted for me what best fitted his taste. My Uncle Joßo, the former infantry officer, saw a certain Bonapartean look in me, which made my father nauseous when he heard it. My Uncle Ildefonso, a simple priest at the time, sensed a canon in me.

“A canon’s what he’s going to be, and I say no more so that it won’t look like pride, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if God has destined him for a bishopric … That’s right, a bishopric. It’s not impossible. What do you say, brother Bento?”

My father replied to all that I would be whatever God wished me to be and he lifted me up into the air as if he intended to show me to the city and to the world. He was asking everybody if I looked like him, if I was intelligent, handsome …

I tell these things haphazardly, according to what I heard years later. I’m ignorant of the greater part of the details of that famous day. I do know that the neighborhood came or sent greetings to the newborn and for the first week there were a lot of visitors to our house. There wasn’t a single sedan chair that wasn’t in use. There were a lot of frock coats and breeches in circulation. If I don’t mention the caresses, kisses, admiration, and blessings it’s because if I did the chapter would never end and I must end it.

Note: I can’t say anything about my baptism because nobody has spoken to me in that regard unless to say that it was one of the grandest affairs of the following year, 1806. I was baptized in São Domingos church one Tuesday in March, a clear day, bright and pure, with Colonel Rodrigues de Matos and his wife as godparents. They were both descendants of old northern families and truly an honor to the
blood that flowed in their veins, which in times past had been shed in the war against Holland. I think the names of both were the first things I learned and I must have repeated them quite graciously or revealed some precocious talent because there was no stranger before whom I wasn’t obliged to recite them.

“Young man, tell these gentlemen your godfather’s name.”

“My godfather? He’s the Honorable Colonel Paulo Vaz Lobo César de Andrade e Sousa Rodrigues de Matos. My godmother is the Honorable Dona Maria Luísa de Macedo Resende e Sousa Rodrigues de Matos.”

“Your boy is a sharp one,” the listeners would exclaim.

“Very sharp,” my father would agree, and his eyes dripped with pride and he would lay his hand on my head, stare at me for a long time lovingly, bursting with pride.

Note: I began to walk. I don’t know exactly when, but ahead of time. Perhaps in order to speed up nature they had me hold onto chairs, held me by the diaper, gave me a wooden cart. “By yourself, by yourself, little master, by yourself, by yourself,” the nursemaid would say to me. And, attracted by the tin rattle that my mother shook in front of me, I would head toward her, fall this way, fall that way, and I was walking, probably not too well, but I was walking, and I kept on walking.

I grew. My family had no part in that. I grew naturally, the way magnolias and cats do. Cats may be less sly and magnolias are certainly less restless than I was in my childhood. The poet said that the child is father to the man. If that’s true, let’s have a look at some of the markings of the child.

From the age of five I’d earned the nickname of “Devil Child,” and I really was just that. I was one of the most malevolent children of my
time, evasive, nosey, mischievous, and willful. For example, one day I split open the head of a slave because she’d refused to give me a spoonful of the cocoanut confection she was making and, not content with that evil deed, I threw a handful of ashes into the bowl and, not satisfied with that mischief, I ran to tell my mother that the slave was the one who’d ruined the dish out of spite. And I was only six years old. Prudêncio, a black houseboy, was my horse every day. He’d get down on his hands and knees, take a cord in his mouth as a bridle, and I’d climb onto his back with a switch in my hand. I would whip him, make him do a thousand turns, left and right, and he would obey—sometimes moaning—but he would obey without saying a word or, at most, an—“Ouch, little master!”—to which I would retort, “Shut your mouth, animal!” Hiding visitors’ hats, pinning paper tails on dignified people, pulling pigtails, pinching matrons on the arm, and many other deeds of that sort were the sign of a restive nature, but I have to believe that they were also the expressions of a robust spirit, because my father held me in great admiration, and if at times he scolded me in the presence of people, he did it as a mere formality. In private he would give me kisses.

You mustn’t conclude that I spent the rest of my life cracking people’s skulls or hiding their hats, but opinionated, selfish, and somewhat contemptuous of people, that I was. If I didn’t spend my time hiding their hats, I did pull their pigtails on occasion.

I also took a liking to the contemplation of human injustice. I tended to mitigate it, explain it, classify it into sections, understand it not according to a rigid pattern but in light of circumstance and place. My mother indoctrinated me in her own way, made me learn certain precepts and prayers by heart. But I felt that, more than by the prayers, I was governed by nerves and blood, and the Golden Rule lost its living spirit and became a hollow formula. In the morning before porridge and at night before bed, I would beg God’s forgiveness the same as I forgave my debtors. But between morning and night I would be involved in some terrible bit of mischief and my father, after the uproar had passed, would pat me on the cheek and exclaim, laughing: “Oh, you little devil! You little devil!”

Yes, my father adored me. My mother was a weak woman with not much brain and lots of heart, quite credulous, sincerely pious—homespun in spite of being pretty and modest in spite of being well-off, afraid of thunder and of her husband. Her husband was her god on Earth. My upbringing was born of the collaboration of those two people and although there was some good about it, in general it was corrupt,
incomplete, and in some ways negative. My uncle the canon would sometime? remark to his brother about it, telling him that he was giving me more freedom than education and more affection than correction, but my father would answer that he was applying a system to my education that was completely superior to the usual system, and in that way, while not confusing his brother, he was duping himself.

Along with communication with education there was also outside example, the domestic milieu. We’ve seen the parents, now let’s have a look at the uncles and the aunt. One of them, João, was a man with a loose tongue, a dashing life, and picaresque conversation. From the age of eleven on I was admitted to his anecdotes, true or otherwise, all contaminated with obscenity or filth. He didn’t respect my adolescence any more than he respected his brother’s cassock, with the difference that the latter would flee as soon as some scabrous subject was touched upon. Not 1.1 allowed myself to stay without understanding anything at first, later understanding, and finally finding him amusing. After a time the one who sought him out was I and he liked me a lot, gave me candy, took me for walks. At home, when he would come to spend a few days, it happened quite often that I would find him in the rear of the house in the laundry chatting with the slave girls who were washing clothes. ‘That’s where he’d string together stories, comments, questions, and there’d be an explosion of laughter that nobody could hear because the laundry was too far away from the house. The black women, with clothes around their middle, their dresses hiked up a little, some inside the tank, others outside, leaning over the articles of clothing, beating them, soaping them, twisting them, went on listening to Uncle Joéo’s jokes and commenting on them from time to time, saying:

“Get thee behind me, Satan! This Master Joao is the devil himself!” My uncle the canon was quite different. He was full of austerity and purity. Those traits weren’t elevating a superior spirit, however, but only compensating for a mediocre one. He was not a man who saw the substantive side of the church. He saw the superficial side; hierarchy, pre-eminences, vestments, genuflections. He was closer to sacristy than to altar. A slip in ritual would arouse him more than an infraction of the commandments. Now, after so many years away from it, I’m not sure whether or not he could easily understand a passage from Tertullian or expound without hesitation the story of the Nicene symbol. But no one at high mass knew better than he the number and type of bows to be made to the officiant. Being canon was the only ambition in his life. And he said with all his heart that it ‘was the only honor to which he
could aspire. Pious, austere in his habits, precise in his observance of the rules, limp, timid, subordinate, he possessed some few virtues in which he was exemplary, but he was absolutely lacking in the strength to instill them or impose them on others.

I won’t say anything about my maternal aunt, Dona Emerenciana, or add that she was the person who had the most authority over me. That made her quite different from the others, but she only lived with us a short time, a couple of years. Other relatives and a few close friends aren’t worth mentioning. We had no life in common, only intermittently and with great spans of separation. What is important is the general description of the domestic milieu and that has been shown here—vulgarity of character, love of gaudy appearance and clamor, a slackness of will, the rule of whim, and more. Out of that earth and that manure this flower was born.

But I don’t want to go ahead without giving a quick rundown of a stirring episode in 1814. I was nine years old.

When I was born Napoleon was already basking in all the splendor of his power and his glory. He was emperor and had completely conquered men’s admiration. My father, who, on the strength of having persuaded others of our nobility had ended up persuading himself, kept on feeding a completely mental hatred of him. That was the motive for some angry disputes in our house because my Uncle João—I don’t know whether out of a spirit of class or sympathy for his profession—pardoned in the despot what he admired in the general. My priest uncle was inflexible in his opposition to the Corsican and my other relatives were divided. That was the basis of the controversy and the rows.

When the news of Napoleon’s first fall reached Rio de Janeiro, there was naturally great shock in our house, but no gibes or taunts. The
losers, witnessing the public rejoicing, considered it more decorous to remain silent. Some even went so far as to clap hands. The populace, cordially happy, didn’t skimp on their affection for the royal family. There were torches, salvos,
Te-Deums
, parades, and cheers. I went about those days with a new rapier my godfather had given me on Saint Anthony’s Day and, quite frankly, I was more interested in the rapier than in Bonaparte’s fall. I’ve never forgotten that. I’ve never stopped thinking to myself that my rapier has always been greater than Napoleon’s sword. And please note that I heard a lot of speeches when I was alive, read a lot of controversial pages with big ideas and bigger words, but—I don’t know why—behind all the applause they drew from my mouth, sometimes that voice of experience would echo: