One thought begets another. The idea of marrying them combined with one of his recent opinions, viz., that calamities and setbacks in matters of the heart come from love being conducted in a purely empirical manner, with no scientific basis. A man and a woman who were aware of the physical and metaphysical reasons for such a sentiment would be more inclined to receive and nourish it effectively than a man and a woman who knew nothing of the phenomenon.
“My young charges are still wet behind the ears,” he said to himself. “I have three or four years ahead of me, and I can start preparing them now. We shall proceed in a logical manner; first, the foundations, then the walls, then the roof . . . rather than starting with the roof . . . Someday we will learn to love just as we learn to read. When that day comes . . .”
He was dazed, dazzled, and delirious. He went to his bookshelves, took down various volumes on astronomy, geology, physiology, anatomy, jurisprudence, politics, and linguistics, opening them, leafing through them, comparing them, and taking a few notes here and there, until he had formulated a program of instruction. It was composed of twenty chapters, and included general concepts of the universe, a definition of life, a demonstration of the existence of man and woman, the organization of societies, the definition and analysis of passion, and the definition and analysis of love, along with its causes, needs, and effects. In truth, they were rather tricky subjects, but he knew how to tame them by using plain, everyday language, giving them a purely familiar tone, just as Fontenelle did when he wrote about astronomy. And he would say emphatically that the essential part of the fruit was the pulp, not the peel.
All of this was highly ingenious, but here is the most ingenious bit. He did not ask them if they wanted to learn. One night, looking up at the sky, he commented on how brightly the stars were shining; and what were the stars? Did they perhaps know what the stars were?
“No, sir.”
From here it was but a short step to beginning a description of the universe. Fulgêncio took that step so nimbly and so naturally that the two youngsters were delighted and charmed, and begged him to continue the journey.
“No,” said the old man. “We won’t exhaust it all today; these things can only be understood slowly. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after . . .”
Thus, stealthily, he began to execute his plan. The two students, astounded by the world of astronomy, begged him every day to continue, and, although Caetaninha was a little confused at the end of this first lesson, she still wanted to hear the other things her godfather had promised to tell them.
I will say nothing about the growing familiarity between the two students, since that would be too obvious. The difference between fourteen and fifteen is so small that the two bearers of those respective ages had little more to do than take each other by the hand. This is what happened.
After three weeks, it was as if they had been raised together. This alone was enough to change Caetaninha’s life, but Raimundo brought her still more. Less than ten minutes ago, we saw her looking longingly at the riding parties of ladies and gentlemen passing along the road. Raimundo put an end to such longings by teaching her to ride, despite the reluctance of her godfather, who feared some accident might befall her. Nevertheless, he gave in and hired two horses. Caetaninha ordered a beautiful riding habit; Raimundo went into the city to buy her gloves and a riding crop, with his uncle’s money (obviously), which also provided him with the boots and other men’s apparel he needed. It was soon a pleasure to behold them both, gallant and intrepid, riding up and down the mountain.
At home, they were free to do as they wished, playing checkers and cards, tending to the birds and the plants. They often quarreled, but, according to the house-slaves, these were silly squabbles that they got into just so that they could make up afterward. Such was the extent of their quarrels. Raimundo sometimes went into the city on his uncle’s instructions. Caetaninha would wait for him at the front gate, watching anxiously. When he arrived, they would always argue, because she wanted to take the largest parcels on the pretext that he looked tired, and he wanted to give her the lightest one, claiming that she was too delicate.
After four months, life had changed completely. One could even say that only then did Caetaninha begin to wear roses in her hair. Before this, she would often come to the breakfast table with her hair uncombed. Now, not only did she comb and brush her hair first thing, she would even, as I say, wear roses—one or even two, which were either picked by her the previous night and kept in water, or picked that very morning by Raimundo, who would then bring them to her window. The window was high up, but, by standing on tiptoe and reaching out his arm, Raimundo managed to hand her the roses. It was at around this time that he acquired the habit of tormenting his incipient mustache, tugging at it, first on one side and then on the other. Caetaninha would rap him on the knuckles to make him desist from such an unseemly practice.
Meanwhile, their lessons followed a regular pattern. They already had a general notion of the universe, and a definition of life that neither of them understood. Thus they reached the fifth month. In the sixth, Fulgêncio began his demonstration of the existence of man. Caetaninha could not help giggling when her godfather asked if they knew that they existed and why; but she quickly became serious, and replied that she did not.
“What about you?”
“No, me neither,” confirmed the nephew.
Fulgêncio began a general, and profoundly Cartesian, demonstration. The following lesson took place in the garden. It had rained heavily in the preceding days, but the sun now flooded everything with light, and the garden resembled a beautiful widow who has swapped her mourning veil for that of a bride. As if wanting to imitate the sun (great things naturally copy each other), Raimundo shot her a long, all-embracing gaze, which Caetaninha received, quivering, just like the garden. Fusion, transfusion, diffusion, confusion, and profusion of beings and things.
While the old man spoke—straightforward, logical, and plodding, relishing his words, and with his eyes fixed on nowhere in particular, his two students made strenuous efforts to listen, but found themselves hopelessly distracted by other things. First, it was a pair of butterflies fluttering in the breeze. Would you please tell me what is so extraordinary about a pair of butterflies? Admittedly, they were yellow, but this alone is insufficient to explain the distraction. Nor was their distraction justified by the fact that the butterflies were chasing each other—to the left, to the right, then up, then down—given that butterflies, unlike soldiers, never travel in a straight line.
“Man’s understanding,” Fulgêncio was saying, “as I have just explained . . .”
Raimundo gazed at Caetaninha, and found her gazing at him. Each of them seemed awkward and confused. She was the first to lower her eyes. Then she raised them again, so as to look at something else farther off, such as the garden wall; on their way there, given that Raimundo’s eyes lay in their path, she glanced at them as briefly as she could. Luckily, the wall presented a spectacle that filled her with surprise: a pair of swallows (it was the day for couples) were hopping along it with the elegance peculiar to winged beings. They chirruped as they hopped, saying things to each other, whatever it might be, perhaps this: that it was a very good thing that there was no philosophy in garden walls. Suddenly one of them took off, probably the female, and the other, naturally the male, was not going to let himself be left behind: he spread his wings and flew off in the same direction. Caetaninha looked down at the grass.
When the lesson finished a few minutes later, she begged her godfather to continue and, when he refused, took him by the arm and invited him to take a turn in the garden.
“No, it’s too sunny,” protested the old man.
“We’ll walk in the shade.”
“It’s terribly hot.”
Caetaninha suggested they remain on the veranda, but her godfather said to her mysteriously that Rome was not built in a day, and ended up saying that he would only continue the lesson two days hence. Caet
aninha retired to her room and stayed there for three-quarters of an hour, with the door closed, either seated or standing at the window or pacing back and forth, or else looking for something she was already holding in her hand, and even going so far as to imagine herself riding up the road alongside Raimundo. At one point, she saw the young man standing by the garden wall, but, on closer inspection she realized it was a pair of beetles buzzing through the air. One of the beetles was saying to the other:
“Thou art the flower of our race, the flower of the air, the flower of flowers, the sun and moon of my life.”
To which the other replied:
“No one exceeds thee in beauty and grace; thy buzzing is an echo of divine voices; but leave me . . . leave me . . .”
“Why should I leave thee, O soul of these sylvan glades?”
“I have told thee, king of pure breezes, leave me.”
“Do not speak to me like that, thou charm and ornament of the forest. Everything above and around us is saying that thou shouldst speak to me another way. Dost thou not know the song of blue mysteries?”
“Let us listen to it upon the green leaves of the orange tree.”
“The leaves of the mango tree are lovelier.”
“Thou art more beautiful than both.”
“And thee, O sun of my life?”
“Moon of my being, I am whatever thou wilt have me be . . .”
This is how the two beetles were talking. She listened to them, engrossed. When they disappeared, she turned away from the window, saw what time it was, and left her bedroom. Raimundo had gone out; she went to wait for him at the front gate for ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty minutes. When he returned, they said very little; they met and parted two or three times. The last time it was she who took him to the veranda, to show him a trinket she thought she’d lost and had just found. Readers, please do her the justice of believing that this was a blatant lie. Meanwhile, Fulgêncio brought the next lesson forward and gave it on the following day between lunch and dinner. Never had he spoken so clearly and simply, which was just as it should be, for it was the lesson concerning the existence of man, a profoundly metaphysical chapter, in which it was necessary to consider everything and from every possible angle.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
“Perfectly.”
And the lesson carried on to its conclusion. When it was over, the same thing happened as the day before. As if she were afraid of being alone, Caetaninha begged him to continue the lesson, or to take a turn about the garden with her. He refused both requests, patted her paternally on the cheek, and went and shut himself up in his study.
“Next week,” the old man thought as he turned the key, “next week I will make a start on the organization of societies; all of next month and the one after will be devoted to the definition and classification of passion; in May we will move on to love . . . by then it will be time . . .”
While he was saying this and closing the study door, a sound echoed forth from the veranda—a thunderclap of kisses, according to the caterpillars in the garden. Mind you, to caterpillars the slightest noise sounds like thunder. As for the authors of the noise, nothing definitive is known. It seems that a wasp, seeing Caetaninha and Raimundo together at that moment, confused coincidence with consequence and deduced that it was them, but an old grasshopper demonstrated the absurdity of such a proposition, citing the fact that he had heard many kisses, long ago, in places where neither Raimundo nor Caetaninha had ever set foot. We may all agree that this latter argument was utter nonsense, but such is the prestige of good character that the grasshopper was applauded for having once again defended both truth and reason. And, on that basis, maybe it was indeed so. But a thunderclap of kisses? Let’s imagine there were two; let’s even imagine three or four.
GALVÃO’S WIFE
PEOPLE BEGAN TO MUTTER about the lawyer’s affection for the brigadier’s widow long before they had even passed the stage of initial flirtation. Such are the ways of the world. It is how some bad reputations are made, and, absurd though it may seem, some good ones too. Indeed, there are lives that have only a prologue, but everyone talks about the great book that ensues, and the author dies with the pages left blank. In the present case, the pages were written and formed a fat volume of three hundred dense pages, not counting the notes. These were placed at the end, not to enlighten the reader, but to remind him or her of the preceding chapters; that is how these collaborative books work. The truth is, though, that they were merely settling on a plan, when the lawyer’s wife received this anonymous note:
Madam, you cannot possibly allow yourself to be so scandalously deceived for a moment longer by one of your own friends, who seeks comfort in her widowhood by seducing other women’s husbands, when it would be enough to keep her ringlets . . .
What ringlets? Maria Olímpia did not ask which ringlets these were; they belonged to the brigadier’s widow, who wore them for pleasure and not for fashion. I believe this took place in 1853. Maria Olímpia read and reread the note; she examined the handwriting, which appeared to be a woman’s, albeit disguised, and mentally she ran through the names of her closest friends, trying to think who the author might be. No one came to mind, and so she folded up the piece of paper and stared down at the carpet, her eyes falling on precisely the part of the pattern where two doves were teaching each other how to make one beak out of two. Some of these ironies of coincidence make you want to tear down the universe. Finally, she put the note in her pocket and turned to face her slave, who was patiently waiting, and who asked her:
“Don’t you want to see the shawl no more, missy?”
Maria Olímpia took the shawl the slave was holding out for her and draped it over her shoulders in front of the mirror. She thought it looked much better on her than it would have on the widow. She compared her own charms with the other woman’s. Neither eyes nor mouth bore any comparison; the widow had narrow little shoulders, a big head, and an ugly gait. She was tall, but what use was that? And thirty-five years old, nine more than her! While she was thinking these thoughts, she adjusted the shawl, pinning and unpinning it this way and that.
“This one looks nicer than the other,” ventured the slave.
“I don’t know,” said the lady, moving closer to the window with both shawls in her hands.
“Put the other one on, missy.”
Missy obeyed. She tried on five of the ten shawls that surrounded her, still in their boxes, from a shop on Rua da Ajuda. She concluded that the first two were the best, but here there was a complication—a minor one, really, but so subtle and so profound in its solution that I would not hesitate to recommend it to our thinkers of 1906. The question was to know which of the two shawls she would choose, given that her husband, a recently qualified lawyer, was asking her to be economical. She looked at them one after another, first preferring one, then the other. Suddenly she remembered her husband’s perfidy, the need to punish him, to make him suffer, to show him that she was no one’s patsy, nor some ragamuffin; and so, out of anger, she bought both shawls.
When four o’clock struck (being the time her husband was due home), there was no husband. Not at four, nor at half-past four. Maria Olímpia imagined all sorts of distressing things; she went to the window, then came back again, fearing an accident or a sudden illness; she also wondered if it might be a jury session. Five o’clock and still nothing. The widow’s ringlets also loomed darkly before her, somewhere between the illness and the jury, in shades of dark blue, which was probably the devil’s color. It really was enough to exhaust the patience of a young woman of twenty-six. Twenty-six, that’s all she was. She was the daughter of a parliamentarian from the time of the Regency, who had died when she was still a child, and an aunt had given her a most unusual upbringing, not taking her to dances or spectacles before her time. She was a religious woman and took her first to church. Maria Olímpia’s vocation was for the outside world, and at the processions and sung masses what she liked best was the hubbub
and the pomp; her devotion was sincere, but tepid and absentminded. The first thing she saw on the church balcony was herself. She particularly enjoyed looking down from above, staring at the crowd of women, kneeling or seated, and the young men who, standing below the choir or at the side doors, enlivened the Latin liturgy with their passionate glances. She didn’t understand the sermons, but the rest—musicians, song, flowers, candles, canopies, gold, people—all cast a peculiar spell on her. A meager faith, then, which became even more so after her first theatrical spectacle and her first ball. She didn’t manage to see Candiani, but she saw Ida Edelvira, danced exuberantly, and gained a reputation for elegance.
It was half-past five when Galvão arrived. When she heard his footsteps, Maria Olímpia, who by then was pacing the drawing room, did what any other lady would do in a similar situation: she picked up a fashion magazine and nonchalantly sat down to read. Galvão entered, smiling and out of breath, asking her affectionately if she was angry, and swearing that he had a good reason for being late, a reason she would thank him for, once she knew . . .
“There’s no need,” she said coldly, interrupting him in midsentence.
She stood up and they went in to dinner. They spoke little, she less than he, but without appearing to be at all upset. Perhaps she had begun to doubt the anonymous letter; it may also be that the two shawls were weighing on her conscience. At the end of dinner, Galvão explained his lateness; he had gone, on foot, to the Teatro Provisório to buy tickets for a box that very evening: they were putting on I Lombardi. On his way back, he had gone to order a carriage—
The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis Page 71