The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (7 page)

“Come on, all you care about is your rapier.”

My family wasn’t satisfied with having an anonymous share of the public celebration. They found it opportune and indispensable to celebrate the overthrow of the emperor with a banquet, and such a banquet that the sound of the acclamations would reach the ears of His Highness or, at least, those of his ministers. No sooner said than done. All the old silver inherited from my grandfather Luís Cubas was taken down. The tablecloths from Flanders were unpacked, the large pitchers from India. A barrow was slaughtered. Compotes and quince marmalades were ordered from the nuns of Ajuda. Everything was washed, scoured, and polished: parlors, stairs, candlesticks, wall brackets, lamp chimneys, all items of classic luxury.

At the given hour a very select: society gathered: the district judge, three or four military officers, some businessmen and lawyers, several government officials, some with their wives and daughters, some without them, but all with a common desire to stuff a turkey with Bonaparte’s memory. It wasn’t a banquet but a
Te-Deum
. That was more or less what one of the lawyers present, Dr. Vilaça, said. He was a famous glosser who added the tidbit of the muses to the dishes of the house. I remember as if it were yesterday, I remember seeing him rise up with his long hair gathered in a pigtail, silk tailcoat, an emerald on his finger, and ask my priest uncle to repeat a maxim, and when the maxim was repeated, he fastened his eyes on the head of a lady, coughed, lifted his right hand, clenched except for his forefinger which pointed to the ceiling, and, posed and composed like that, he gave back the word with a gloss. Not just one gloss, but three. Then he swore to his gods that it would never end. He would ask for a maxim, would be given one, would
quickly gloss it, and then ask for another, and another, to the point that one of the ladies present couldn’t keep her admiration silent.

“You say that,” Vilaça modestly replied, “because you never heard Bocage in Lisbon at the end of the century as I did. That was something! The ease! And such lines of poetry! We had battles that went on glossing for an hour or two in the midst of applause and bravos in Nicola’s bar. Bocage had a tremendous talent! That was what I was told a few days ago by Her Grace the Duchess of Cadaval…”

And those last three words, expressed quite emphatically, produced a flutter of admiration and amazement in all assembled because so cordial and so simple a man, in addition to competing with poets, was close to duchesses! A Bocage and a Cadaval! Contact with such a man made the ladies feel superrefined. The males looked on him with respect, some with envy, no few with disbelief. He, meanwhile, went along piling adjective on adjective, adverb on adverb, listing everything that rhymed with
tyrant
and
usurper
. It was dessert time. No one was thinking anymore about eating. During the intervals in the glosses a merry murmur went about, the chatter of full stomachs. The eyes, sluggish and moist or lively and warm, lounged or leaped about the table loaded with sweets and fruit—pineapple wedges here, melon slices there, the crystal dessert dishes displaying the thinly shredded cocoanut sweets, yellow as an egg yolk—or the molasses, thick and dark, not far from the cheese. From time to time a full, jovial, unbuttoned laugh—a family laugh—would come along to break the political gravity of the banquet. In the midst of the great and common interest, the small and private ones were also moving about. The girls spoke about the
modinhas
they were going to sing to the accompaniment of the harpsichord, the minuets, the English airs. Nor was there any lack of a matron who promised to perform an eight-beat dance just to show them how she had enjoyed herself in the good old days of childhood. One fellow, next to me, was passing on to another a recent report on the new slaves who were on their way according to letters he’d received from Luanda, one letter in which his nephew told him that he’d already made a deal for about forty head, and another in which … He had them right there in his pocket but he couldn’t read them on that occasion. What he guaranteed is that from this one shipment we can count on some hundred and twenty slaves at least.

“Shh … shh … shh …,” Vilaça was saying, clapping his hands. The noise quickly stopped, like a pause with an orchestra, and all eyes turned to the glosser. Those farther off cupped their ears in order not to lose a
single word. Most of them, even before the gloss, had already given a chuckle of approval, mild and sincere.

As for me, there I was, solitary and out of it, making eyes at a certain dessert that was my passion. I was happy with the end of each gloss, hoping that it would be the last, but it wasn’t, and the dessert remained intact. No one had thought to say the first word. My father, at the head of the table, was savoring the joy of the guests with deep swallows, he had eyes only for the jolly fat faces, the dishes, the flowers. He was delighted with the familiarity that bound the most distant spirits together, the influence of a good dinner. I could see that because I dragged my eyes away from the compote to him and then from him back to the compote, as if begging him to serve me some. But it was in vain. He didn’t see anything; he was seeing himself. And the glosses went on one after the other like sheets of water, obliging me to withdraw the desire and the plea. I was as patient as I could be, but I couldn’t be for long. I asked for some dessert in a low voice. Finally I roared, bellowed, stamped my feet. My father, who would have given me the sun if I’d asked for it, called to a slave to serve me the sweet, but it was too late. Aunt Emerenciana pulled me out of my chair and turned me over to a slave girl in spite of my shouts and shoves.

The glosser’s crime had been only that: delaying the compote and bringing about my exclusion. But that was sufficient for me to think about revenge, whatever it might be, that would be huge and exemplary, which would make him look ridiculous in some way. Since Dr. Vilaça was a serious man, mannerly and calm, forty-seven years old, married and a father, I wasn’t content with a paper tail or his pigtail. It had to be something worse. I began scrutinizing him for the rest of the afternoon, following him around the grounds, where they’d all gone to stroll. I saw him chatting with Dona Eusébia, Sergeant-Major Domingues’ sister, a big robust maiden lady, who, if she wasn’t pretty, wasn’t ugly either.

“I’m very angry with you,” she was telling him.

“Why?”

“Because … I don’t know why… because it’s my fate … sometimes I think dying is better …”

They’d gone behind a little thicket. It was twilight. I followed them. There was a spark of wine and sensuality in Vilaça’s eyes.

“Let go of me,” she said.

“Nobody can see us. Dying, my angel? What kind of an idea is that? You know that I would die, too … What am I saying? … I die every day, from passion, from longing …”

Dona Eusébia put her handkerchief to her eyes. The glosser was digging in his memory for some literary fragment and he found this one, which I later discovered was from an opera by Antônio José da Silva, the Jew:

“Don’t weep my love, don’t wish for the day to break with two dawns.”

He said that and pulled her toward him. She resisted some but let herself go. Their faces came together and I heard the smack, very light, of a kiss, the most timid of kisses.

“Dr. Vilaça kissed Dona Eusébia!” I bellowed, running through the yard.

Those words of mine were an explosion. Stupefaction immobilized everyone. Eyes looked out all over. Smiles were exchanged, furtive whispers. Mothers dragged their daughters off with the pretext of the dew. My father pulled my ears, faking it but really annoyed at my indiscretion. The next day at lunch, however, recalling the incident, he tweaked my nose, laughing: “Oh, you little devil! You little devil!”

Let’s put our feet together now and leap over school, the irksome school where I learned to read, write, count, whack noggins, get mine whacked, and make mischief, sometimes up on the hills, sometimes on the beaches, wherever it was convenient for loafers.

They were bitter times. There were the scoldings, the punishments, the arduous long lessons and little else, very little and very slight. The only really bad part was the whacking of the palms with a ruler, and even then … Oh, ruler, terror of my boyhood, you who were the
compelle intrare
with which an old teacher, bony and bald, instilled in my brain the alphabet, prosody, syntax, and everything else he knew, blessed ruler, so cursed by moderns, if only I could have remained under
your yoke with my beardless soul, my ignorance, and my rapier, that rapier from 1814, so superior to Napoleon’s sword! What was it that my old primary teacher wanted, after all? Memorization and behavior in the classroom. Nothing more, nothing less than what life, the final class, wants, with the difference that if you put fear into me, you never put anger. I can still see you now, coming into the room with your white leather slippers, cape, handkerchief in hand, bald head on display, chin clean-shaven. I see you sit down, snort, grunt, take an initial pinch of snuff, and then call us to order for the lesson. And you did that for twenty-three years, quiet, obscure, punctual, stuck in a little house on the Rua do Piolho, not bothering the world with your mediocrity, until one day you took the great dive into the shadows and nobody wept for you except an old black man—no one, not even I, who owe you the rudiments of writing.

The teacher’s name was Ludgero. Let me write his full name on this page: Ludgero Barata—a disastrous name whose second part means cockroach and that gave the boys an eternal basis for crude jokes. One of us, Quincas Borba, was cruel to the poor man at that time. Two or three times a week he would put a dead roach into his pants pocket—wide trousers tied with a cord—or in the desk drawer, or by his inkwell. If he found it during school hours he would leap up, pass his flaming eyes over us, call us by our last names: we were parasites, ignoramuses, brats, scoundrels … Some trembled, others snorted. Quincas Borba, however, allowed himself to remain quiet, his eyes staring into space.

A delight, Quincas Borba. Never in my childhood, never in my whole life did I find a funnier, more inventive, more mischievous boy. He was a delight not only in school but all over the city. His mother, a widow of certain means, worshiped her son and would bring him to school pampered, well dressed, all decked out, with a striking houseboy following, a houseboy who would let us play hooky, go hunt for birds’ nests or lizards on Livramento and Conceição hills, or simply roam the streets on the loose like two idle loafers. And as emperor! It was a pleasure to see Quincas Borba play the emperor during the festival of the Holy Spirit. In our children’s games he would always choose the role of king, minister, general, someone supreme, whoever he might be. The rascal had poise and gravity, a certain magnificence in his stance, in his walk. Who would have said that… Let’s hold back our pen, let’s not get ahead of events. Let’s take a leap to 1822, the date of our political independence and of my first personal captivity.

I was seventeen. My upper lip was beginning to sprout as I strove to grow a mustache. My eyes, lively and resolute, were my really masculine feature. Since I showed a certain haughtiness it was hard to tell whether I was a child with the arrogance of a man or a man with the look of a boy. In short, I was a handsome young fellow, handsome and bold, who was entering life in boots and spurs, a whip in his hand and blood in his veins, mounted on a nervous, robust, swift steed, like the steeds in ancient ballads, for whom romanticism went looking in medieval castles, only to run into him on the streets of our century. The worst is that the romantics wore the fellow out so much that it became necessary to lay him aside, where realism came to find him, eaten by leprosy and worms, and, out of compassion, they bore him off for their books.

Yes, I was that handsome, graceful, well-to-do young fellow, and it’s easy to imagine how more than one lady lowered her pensive brow before me or lifted her covetous eyes up to me. Of them all, however, the one who captivated me immediately was a … a … I don’t know if I should say it. This book is chaste, at least in its intention. In its intention it is ever so chaste. But out with it, either you say everything or nothing. The one who captivated me was a Spanish woman, Marcela, “beautiful Marcela,” as the boys of those times called her. And the boys were right. She was the daughter of a gardener from Asturias. She told me so herself during a day of sincerity, because the accepted version was that she’d been born to a lawyer from Madrid, a victim of the French invasion, wounded, jailed, and shot when she was only twelve years old.
Cosas de España
. Whatever her father was, however, lawyer or gardener, the truth is that Marcela didn’t have any rustic innocence and hardly understood the morality of the law. She was a good girl, cheerful, without scruples, a little hampered by the austerity of the times, which wouldn’t allow her to haul her flightiness and her gossip games through the streets, fond of luxury, impatient, a friend of money and young men. That year she was madly in love with a certain Xavier, a wealthy and tubercular fellow—a pearl.

I saw her for the first: time on the Rossio Grande, the night of fireworks celebrating the declaration of independence, a springtime festival, the dawn of the public soul. We were a couple of youths, the people and I, We were coming out of childhood with all the ecstasy of youth. I saw her get out of a sedan chair, graceful and eye-catching, a slim, swaying body, elegant—something I’d never found in chaste women, “Follow me,” she said to her page. And I followed her, as much a page as the other, as if the order had been given to me. I let myself go, in love, vibrant, full of the first inklings of a dawn. Along the way they called out to her, “Beautiful Marcela!” I remembered that I’d heard that name from my Uncle João and I stood there, I must confess, I stood there stupefied.