“Watch out or you’ll kill that bunny!” the washerwoman protested. “Try not to bang it around, but don’t let go of it either.”
She was going to say something else, but she suddenly reached a climax and closed her eyes, rolling her head and gritting her teeth.
At that instant, they heard footsteps swiftly approaching and Henrique glimpsed Bruno’s surly countenance through the bushes.
Henrique didn’t wait for the blacksmith to get close enough to see him. He leapt up, ducked behind some banana trees and made his way through the bamboo grove as quickly as the rabbit, which, finding itself free, sped off in the opposite direction.
A second later, Bruno appeared beside his wife, who was still pulling on her wet skirt.
“Who the hell were you screwing around with, bitch?” he bellowed.
And before she could answer, a formidable slap sent her sprawling.
Leocádia howled with pain and finished dressing beneath a shower of kicks and slaps.
“This time I saw you! Now try and deny it!”
“Get off the earth!” she exclaimed, her face red as a beet. “I said I didn’t want anything to do with you, you stupid drunk!”
And seeing him about to return to the attack, she bent over, picked up a big rock lying at her feet, raised it above her head and shouted, “Come a little closer and I’ll break your face!”
The blacksmith knew she was capable of making good her threat and stayed where he was, livid and panting.
“Pack your stuff and get out!”
“Aw gee, that’s terrible! I’ve been planning to leave for a while. All I wanted was a good excuse. I don’t need you for anything!”
And to make him even madder, she pointed to her belly and added, “I’ve got everything I need right here. I’ll get a job as a wet nurse! Not everyone’s like you, you useless hunk of junk! You’re not even good for having babies!”
“Don’t try to swipe anything from our house, you filthy slut!”
“Don’t worry. I won’t take anything of yours. I don’t need it!”
“Put that rock down.”
“The hell I will. I’ll bash your brains out if you come a little closer.”
“Sure you will, if I don’t get you first.”
“Now get the hell away!”
He turned and strode off in the direction he had come from, hanging his head and with his hands in his pockets, acting as though he couldn’t have cared less about what had happened.
It was only then that she remembered the rabbit.
“Damn it!” she cried, straightening her clothes and setting out in the opposite direction.
Bruno headed straight for São Romão, where he told whoever wished to listen the entire story. The courtyard was in an uproar. “Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later!” “She couldn’t get away with that stuff forever!” “She was asking for it!” But no one could figure out who the devil Bruno had caught her with. A thousand hypotheses arose: Names and more names were mentioned, but none of them seemed to resolve the mystery. Albino tried to arrange a reconciliation, insisting that Bruno was mistaken. “Leocádia’s a good woman; she’d never do a thing like that.” The blacksmith shut his mouth with a slap, and no one else tried to interfere.
Meanwhile, Bruno entered his house and began throwing all his wife’s belongings out the window. A chair smashed against the cobbles. It was followed by a kerosene lamp, a sack of washing, calico skirts and blouses, hatboxes full of old clothes, a birdcage, a tea kettle. Everything was strewn about the courtyard, whose inhabitants gaped in silence. A Chinese peddler who was selling shrimps and had absentmindedly stopped beneath Bruno’s window got hit on the head with a jug and screamed like a beaten child. Machona, who couldn’t bear anyone shouting louder than her, fell upon him with her fists and, insulting him, dragged him to the gate and threw him out. “Just what we needed: Some goddamned Chink to kick up even more of a fuss!” Dona Isabel, whose hands were folded over her belly, sadly gazed upon the cyclone of destruction. Augusta shook her head in amazement, unable to imagine that a woman would chase after men when she already had one. Bruxa felt so indifferent that she didn’t even stop work, while Das Dores, her hands on her hips and her skirt hitched up, a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, defied Bruno’s wrath, as brutal as her own husband’s had been.
“They’re all jackasses!” she commented, wrinkling her nose. “If some woman’s stupid enough to try to please them every way she can, they get bored, and if she doesn’t take that marriage nonsense seriously, they beat the hell out of her like this goon. They’re all scum!”
Florinda laughed, as she always did, and Marciana complained that the kerosene had stained the laundry she had hung out to dry. Just at that moment a cloth coffee filter full of grounds did two somersaults and strewed its black contents across the courtyard, spattering the clothes left out to bleach. This caused an uproar among the washerwomen. “Hey, what the hell does he think he’s doing? Does he think we have to stop work so he can throw a tantrum? Damn it! Let him keep his troubles to himself! He made his bed; now let him lie in it! If he’s going to make a mess every time Leocádia screws around behind his back, we’ll never earn a living! What a pain in the ass!” Holding her sewing in her hand, Pombinha came to the door of number fifteen to see what the fuss was about, while Nenen, flushed from the heat of the iron she had been wielding, asked, with a giggle, whether Bruno was redecorating. Rita feigned indifference and kept on washing. “I bet their wedding was real pretty, so now let them take the consequences! She was a free woman before she met that moron!” Old Libório approached, hoping to sneak off with something amid the commotion, and Machona, seeing Agostinho preparing to do likewise, pulled him away, “Get out of there, you brat! Just touch something and I’ll skin you alive!”
A man appeared, clad in a dark brown habit, holding a silver staff with a pennant in one hand and a salver in the other. Planting himself in the middle of the courtyard, he pleaded in a whiny voice, “A penny for candles for the blessed sacrament!” The women left their washing and devoutly kissed the dove on the pennant. Small coins rang upon his salver.
Bruno had finished throwing his wife’s possessions out the window and left his house, locking the door behind him. He silently strode through the crowd of whispering onlookers, scowling and swinging his arms as if, despite everything, his anger remained unappeased.
Leocádia appeared shortly thereafter and, seeing all her worldly goods strewn about, furiously approached the door and began to pound it with her buttocks. She broke the latch that held the two sides together, the door flew open, and she landed on her rump inside.
She rose to her feet, ignoring the crowd’s laughter, and, after flinging open the window, she began to throw out everything that remained in the house.
Then the real devastation started. And with every object she tossed into the courtyard, she shouted, “Take that, you bastard!”
“There goes the clock. Take that, you bastard!”
And the clock smashed against the cobbles.
“There goes the pot!”
“There goes the pitcher!”
“There go the glasses!”
“The hatrack!”
“The demijohn!”
“The chamberpot!”
A general, contagious guffaw drowned out the sound of smashing crockery. Leocádia no longer needed to say a word, because each object was greeted by a raucous chorus of, “Take that, you bastard!”
And she went on with her housecleaning. João Romão came running, but no one bothered about his presence. A mountain of junk had risen outside Bruno’s door, and the destruction was in full swing when the blacksmith reappeared, clutching a spoke from a wagon wheel in his right hand.
Tripping over one another, the onlookers hastily gathered around him.
“Don’t hit her!”
“Stop that!”
“Grab him!”
“Don’t let him beat her!”
“Get rid of that stick!”
“Hold onto him!”
“Keep him there!”
“Grab that stick!”
And Leocádia escaped her husband’s wrath as the crowd disarmed him.
“Hey! Stop that! That’s enough noise!” exclaimed João Romão, whom someone, taking advantage of the general confusion, had kicked in the pants.
At that moment, Alexandre returned from work, hastened to Bruno’s house, and, full of authority, intimated that if Bruno didn’t control himself and leave his wife alone he would shortly find himself locked up at the police station.
“First I catch this slut in the act and then she tries to smash everything I own! Is that right?” Bruno asked, foaming with rage and scarcely able to get the words out.
“You broke my stuff first!” Leocádia screamed.
“Now calm down,” said the policeman, trying to assume an air of reasonableness.
“One at a time,” he added, turning to the accused party. “Your husband says you—”
“It’s a lie!” she roared.
“A lie? That’s a good one! You had your skirt off and a man was on top of you!”
“Who was it? Who was the man?” everyone asked at once.
“Yes, who was it?” Alexandre asked.
“I couldn’t see his face,” the blacksmith replied, “but if I catch him I’ll break his neck!”
A chorus of laughter burst forth.
“That’s a lie!” Leocádia repeated, suddenly overcome by tears. “This bastard’s been looking for an excuse to get rid of me, and since I won’t give him one . . .”
She began to sob so uncontrollably that she could no longer speak.
This time no one laughed, and a murmur arose from the crowd.
“Now,” she continued, wiping away her tears, “I don’t know what’ll become of me, because this man spent or wrecked everything I brought with me when we got married!”
“Didn’t you say you had everything you needed to make a living in your belly? So go ahead!”
“That’s not true,” Leocádia sobbed.
“Well,” Alexandre interjected, sheathing his saber, “that’s that! Your husband’s going to take you back—”
“Me?” Bruno hissed. ‘You don’t know me!”
“And I don’t want to!” the woman retorted. “I’d rather sleep in the gutter than put up with this brute!”
After gathering the few possessions she still had in the house and what she thought could be salvaged from the pile outside, she tied everything up in a bundle and set out in search of someone to carry it for her.
Rita then appeared.
“Where are you going?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, honey, somewhere. I have to find someplace to stay. I mean, even dogs have a corner to sleep in.”
“Wait a second,” said the mulatta. “Listen; throw that stuff inside my house.” She hurried over to Albino and said, “Wash these clothes for me, okay? And when Firmo wakes up, tell him I had to go out.”
Then she ran inside, changed her wet skirt, threw her crocheted shawl over her shoulders, and, patting her friend on the back, whispered, “Come with me! We’ll find you someplace to stay!”
And the two women hurried out, leaving the whole courtyard in a state of suspended curiosity.
IX
Weeks went by. Jerônimo now drank a big mug of coffee every morning, just like Rita, along with a shot of rum “to get the chill out of his bones.”
Day by day, hour by hour, a slow but profound change was transforming him, altering his body and sharpening his senses as silently and mysteriously as a butterfly growing in its cocoon. His energy drained away; he became contemplative and easygoing. He found life in the Americas and Brazil’s landscapes exciting and seductive; he forgot his earlier ambitions and began to enjoy new, pungent, strong sensations. He was more generous and less concerned about tomorrow, quicker to spend than to save. He developed desires, enjoyed his pleasures, and grew lazy, bowing in defeat before the blazing sun and hot weather: a wall of fire behind which the last Tamoio Indian’s rebellious spirit defends its fatherland against conquering adventurers from overseas.
And so, little by little, all the sober habits of a Portuguese peasant were transformed, and Jerônimo became a Brazilian. His house lost its air of somber enclosure; friends from São Romão dropped in to chat, and guests were invited to dinner on Sundays. The revolution was soon complete: Cane liquor replaced wine; manioc flour supplanted bread; stewed codfish gave way to dried beef and black beans; chili peppers invaded his table; bacon soups and meat pies were pushed aside by Bahian delicacies, by dishes cooked with palm oil, coconut milk, and strange herbs. Brazilian kale displaced Portuguese cabbage; cornmeal mush dethroned brown bread, and, once the aroma of hot coffee had begun to fill his house, Jerônimo discovered the pleasures of tobacco and started smoking with his friends.
And the strangest thing is that the more he adopted Brazilian ways, the more acute his senses became and the more his body weakened. He had a more refined ear for music, he even grasped the poetry in backcountry ballads of unrequited love, sung to the accompaniment of a strummed guitar. His eyes, clouded previously by nostalgia for his native land, now, like those of a sailor accustomed to endless vistas of sea and sky, no longer fought against Brazil’s fierce, turbulent, joyous light but opened wide before marvelous mountain ranges punctuated by huge monarchs that the sun clad in gold and precious stones and the clouds draped in white cambric turbans, lending them the aspect of voluptuous Arabian potentates.
But his wife, Piedade de Jesus, saw things quite differently. She, all of a piece, compact, inflexible, was influenced only superficially by her environment. Her ways changed, but her attitudes remained the same. Nor did her soul adapt, as her husband’s had, to her new country. She yielded passively in her habits, but in the depths of her being she was the same homesick colonist, as loyal to her traditions as she was to her husband. She now felt even sadder; sadder because Jerônimo was changing; sadder because every day she noticed some new alteration; sadder because he seemed so strange and distant, so unknown. At night she would wake with a start beside that man who no longer acted like her husband—that man who washed every day, who perfumed his hair and beard on Sundays, and whose breath smelled of tobacco. How pained she had felt the first time Jerônimo, pushing aside the bowl of soup she had placed before him, said: “Honey, why don’t you cook some local dishes?”
“But I don’t know how . . .” the poor woman stammered.
“Then ask Rita to teach you—it wouldn’t be hard to learn! See if you can cook some shrimps like she made the other day. They tasted so good!”
Jerônimo’s progressive Brazilianization tormented the poor woman. Her feminine intuition told her that when the process was complete, he would have no more use for her in bed than he had at table.
Jerônimo, in fact, belonged to her far less than he once had. He never cuddled up with her, his caresses were cold and absentminded, offered more out of kindness than out of passion. He never grabbed her hips when they were alone together or fooled around as he had before. He was never the seducer, never; when she required his services, it was she who had to arouse him. And one night, Piedade felt even more miserable than usual because, using the excuse that it was stuffy in their bedroom, he went to sleep on the sofa in their sitting room. From then on they slept apart. Jerônimo bought a hammock like the one Rita had and hung it opposite his front door.
Another night was even worse. Piedade, certain that her husband would not approach her, sought him out. Jerônimo pretended to feel unwell, refused, and gently pushed her away, saying, “I wasn’t going to say anything, but . . . you know, you should wash every day, and . . . change your clothes. . . . It’s not the same here as it was over there. Here people sweat a lot more. You have to wash all the time if you don’t want to smell bad . . . now don’t get upset!”
She burst into tears. It was an explosion of all the res
entment and sorrow in her heart.
“Now why are you crying? Come on, honey, stop that.”
She kept weeping inconsolably; sobs wracked her body.
After a while, Jerônimo added, “What’s the matter? Why are you making such a fuss over nothing?”
“You don’t love me anymore! You’re not the same man I married! Before you never found anything to criticize, and now I even smell bad to you!”
And her sobs grew louder.
“Don’t be silly, honey!”
“I know what’s going on!”
“You’re being stupid—that’s what’s going on.”
“I curse the day we came to live in this damned house! I would have rather had a big rock fall on my head and kill me!”
“You’re complaining for no reason! Shame on you!”
This quarrel was the first of many that, with the passage of time, grew more frequent. Ah! There was no longer any doubt that Jerônimo had fallen for Rita. Whenever he returned to São Romão during the day, he would stop outside the door to number nine and ask how she was doing. The fact that the mulatta had cured him when he was sick provided the pretext for many a thoughtful gift. He did her favors and was full of compliments when he visited. There was always something he wanted to ask her about—Leocádia, for example. Ever since Rita had taken the blacksmith’s wife under her wing, Jerônimo pretended to be very concerned about “the poor woman.”
“You did right, Nha Rita, you did right—it shows what a good heart you have.”
“Ah, my friend. In this world one day it’s you and the next day it’s me—”
Rita had found Leocádia a place to stay, first with some friends in Catete who made their living ironing clothes, and then with a family that hired her to look after the children. And now the woman had found a good position at a girls’ school.
“That’s wonderful!” Jerônimo exclaimed.
“Well, what did you expect?” the Bahian replied. “The world’s a big place. There’s room for everyone. Only an idiot would kill himself!”
The Slum (Library of Latin America) Page 10