The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

by Machado De Assis

  “Do you think it’s new? I bet you do.”

  “Come on, brother, let’s stop this,” Sabina said, getting up from the sofa. “We can work everything out in a friendly fashion, smoothly. For example, Cotrim won’t take the slaves, only the coachman and Paulo …”

  “Not the coachman,” I hastened to add. “I’m getting the carriage and I’m not going to buy another driver.”

  “Well, I’ll stick with Paulo and Prudêncio.”

  “Prudêncio is free.”

  “Free?”

  “Since two years ago.”

  “Free? How could your father have managed things here without telling anyone? That’s great! What about the silver? … I don’t imagine he freed the silver, did he?”

  We’d spoken about the silver, the old silver from the time of Dom José I, the most important part of the inheritance, for its workmanship, for its antiquity, for the origins of its ownership. My father had said that the Count da Cunha, when he was Viceroy of Brazil, had given it to my great-grandfather Luís Cubas, as a present.

  “About the silver,” Cotrim went on, “I wouldn’t bring it up if it weren’t for your sister’s wish to keep it. And I think she’s right. Sabina’s a married woman and she needs a fine setting, a presentable one. You’re a bachelor, you don’t entertain, you don’t…”

  “But I might get married.”

  “What for?” Sabina interrupted.

  That question was so sublime that for a few moments it made me forget all about my interests. I smiled, took Sabina’s hand, patted her palm lightly, all with such a delicate appearance that Cotrim interpreted the gesture as one of acquiescence and he thanked me.

  “What’s that?” I retorted. “I haven’t given up anything and I’m not going to.”

  “You’re not going to?”

  I nodded.

  “Let it pass, Cotrim,” my sister said to her husband. “Let’s see if he wants the clothes on our backs, too. That’s all that’s missing.”

  “Nothing more is missing. You want the carriage, you want the coachman, you want the silver, you want everything. Look, it would be quicker if you took us to court and proved with witnesses that Sabina isn’t your sister, that I’m not your brother-in-law, and that God isn’t God. Do that and you won’t lose anything, not even a little teaspoon. Come now, my friend, try something else!”

  He was so irritated that I no less that I thought of suggesting a means for conciliation: dividing up the silver. He laughed and asked me who would get the teapot and who would get the sugar bowl. And, after that question, he declared that we would have an opportunity to liquidate our demands in court at least. In the meantime Sabina had gone to the window that looked out onto the grounds—and after a moment she turned and proposed giving up Paulo and the other black on the condition that she get the silver. I was going to say that I didn’t want that, but Cotrim got ahead of me and said the same thing.

  “Never! I won’t give any charitable donations,” he said.

  We dined sadly. My uncle the canon appeared after dinner and witnessed yet another small altercation.

  “My children,” he said. “Remember that my brother left a loaf large enough to be divided up for everyone.”

  But Cotrim said, “I know, I know. But the question doesn’t concern the bread, it concerns the butter. I can’t swallow dry bread.”

  The division was finally made but peace wasn’t. And I can tell you that, even so, it was very difficult for me to break with Sabina. We’d been such good friends! Childhood games, childhood furies, the laughter and sadness of adult life, so many times we’d divided that loaf of joy and misery like brother and sister, like the good brother and sister we were. But we’d broken up. Just like Marcela’s beauty, which had vanished with the smallpox.

  XLVII

  The Recluse

  Marcela, Sabina, Virgília … here I am putting together all the contrasts as if those names and people were only stages of my inner affections. Be sorry for bad habits, put on a stylish necktie, a less-stained waistcoat, and then, yes, come with me, enter this house, stretch out on this hammock that cradled me for the better part of two years, from the inventory of my father’s estate until 1842. Come. If you smell some dressing-table perfume, don’t think I had it sprinkled for my pleasure. It’s the vestige of N. or Z. or U.—because all those capital letters cradle their elegant abjection there. But, if in addition to the perfume you want some thing else, keep that wish to yourself, because I don’t keep portraits or letters or diaries. The excitement itself has vanished and left me with the initials.

  I lived half like a recluse, attending, after long intervals, some ball or theater or a lecture, but I spent most of the time by myself. I was living, letting myself float on the ebb and tide of events and days, sometimes lively, sometimes apathetic, somewhere between ambitious and disheartened. I was writing politics and making literature. I sent articles and poems to newspapers and I managed to attain a certain reputation as a polemicist and poet. When I thought of Lobo Neves, who was already a deputy, and Virgília, a future marchioness, I asked myself whether I wouldn’t have been a better deputy and a better marquis than Lobo Neves—I, who was worth more, much more, than he—and I said that looking at the tip of my nose …

  XLVIII

  A Cousin of Virgília’s

  “Do you know who got in from São Paulo yesterday?” Luís Dutra asked me one night.

  Luís Dutra was a cousin of Virgília’s who was also an intimate of the muses. His poetry was more pleasing and was worth more than mine, but he had a need for the approval of some in order to confirm the applause of others. Since he was bashful he never asked anyone, but he enjoyed hearing some word of appreciation. Then he would gather new strength and plunge into the work like an adolescent.

  Poor Luís Dutra! As soon as he published something he would run to my place and start hovering around me on the lookout for an opinion, a word, a gesture that would approve his recent production, and I would speak to him of a thousand different things—the latest ball in Catete, salon discussions, carriages, horses—about everything except his poetry or prose. He would respond with animation at first, then more sluggishly, turning the gist of the conversation toward his matter. He would open a book, ask me if I’d done any new work, and I would answer yes or no and turn the direction away and there he was behind me, until he would be completely balked and go away sad. My intent was to make him doubt himself, dishearten him, eliminate him. And all of that looking at the tip of my nose …

  XLIX

  The Tip of My Nose

  Nose, conscience without remorse, you were very helpful to me in life … Have you ever meditated sometime on the purpose the nose, dear reader? Dr. Pangloss’ explanation is that the nose was created for the use of eyeglasses—and I must confess that such an explanation, up till a certain time, seemed to be the definitive one for me. But it happened one day while ruminating on those and other obscure philosophical points that I hit upon the only true and definitive explanation.

  All I needed, really, was to follow the habits of a fakir. As the reader knows, a fakir spends long hours looking at the tip of his nose with his only aim that of seeing the celestial light. When he fixes his eyes on the tip of his nose he loses his sense of outside things, becomes enraptured with the invisible, learns the intangible, becomes detached from the world, dissolves, is aetherialized. That sublimation of the being by the tip of the nose is the most lofty phenomenon of the spirit, and the faculty for obtaining it doesn’t belong to the fakir alone. It’s universal. Every man has the need and the power to contemplate his own nose with an aim to see the celestial light, and such contemplation, whose effect is subordination to just one nose, constitutes the equilibrium of societies. If noses only contemplated each other, humankind wouldn’t have lasted two centuries, it would have died out with the earliest tribes.

  I can hear an objection on the part of the reader here. “How can it be like that,” he asks, “if no one has ever seen m
en contemplating their own noses?”

  Obtuse reader, that proves you’ve never got inside the brain of a milliner. A milliner passes by a hat shop, the shop of a rival who’d opened it two years before. It had two doors then, now it has four. It promises to have six or eight. The rival’s customers are going in through the doors. The milliner compares that shop with his, which is older and has only two doors, and those hats with his, less sought after even though priced the same. He’s naturally mortified, but he keeps on walking, concentrating, with his eyes lowered or straight ahead, pondering the reasons for the other man’s prosperity and his own backwardness while he as a milliner is a much better milliner than the other milliner … At that moment his eyes are fixed on the tip of his nose.

  The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two capital forces: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.

  L

  Virgília Wed

  “The one who’d got in from São Paulo was my cousin Virgília, married to Lobo Neves,” Luís Dutra went on.

  “Oh!”

  “And today I learned something for the first time, you rogue …”

  “What was that?”

  “That you wanted to many her.”

  “My father’s idea. Who told you that?”

  “She did herself. I talked about you a lot to her and then she told me everything.”

  The following day on the Rua do Ouvidor, in the doorway of Plancher the printer, I saw a splendid woman appear in the distance. It was she. I only recognized her when she was a few steps away, she was so different, nature and art had given her their final touch. We greeted each other. She went on her way, joined her husband in the carriage that was waiting for them a little farther on. I was astounded.

  A week later I ran into her at a ball. I think we got to exchange two or three words. But at another ball given a month later at the house of a lady, whose salons were the jewel of the first reign and were no less that of the second, the meeting was broader and longer because we chatted and waltzed. The waltz is a delightful thing. We waltzed. I won’t deny that as I pressed that flexible and magnificent body to my body I had a singular sensation, the sensation of a man who’d been robbed.

  “It’s very hot,” she said when we finished. “Shall we go out onto the terrace?”

  “No, you might catch cold. Let’s go into the other room.”

  In the other room was Lobo Neves, who paid me many compliments for my political writings, adding that he couldn’t say anything about the literary ones because he didn’t understand them, but the political ones were excellent, well thought out and well written. I replied with an equal show of courtesy and we separated, pleased with each other.

  About three weeks later I received an invitation from him for an intimate gathering. I went. Virgília greeted me with these gracious words: “You’re going to waltz with me tonight.” The truth was that I had the reputation of being an eminent waltzer. Don’t be surprised over the fact that she preferred me. We waltzed once and once again. If a book brought on Francesca’s downfall, here it was the waltz that brought on ours. I think I grasped her hand that night with great strength and she left it there, as if forgetful, and I embraced her, and with all eyes on us and on the others who were also embracing and twirling … Delirium.

  LI

  Mine

  “She’s mine!” I said to myself as soon as I passed her on to another gentleman. And I must confess that for the rest of the evening the idea was becoming embedded in my spirit, not with the force of a hammer, but with that of a drill, which is more insinuative.

  “Mine!” I said when I got to the door of my house.

  But there, as if fate or chance or whatever it was remembered to feed my passionate flight of fancy, a round, yellow thing was gleaming at me on the ground. I bent over. It was a gold coin, a half doubloon.

  “Mine!” I repeated, and laughed.

  That night I didn’t think about the coin anymore, but on the following day, remembering the incident, I felt a certain revulsion in my conscience and a voice that asked me why the devil a coin that I hadn’t inherited or earned but only found in the street should be mine. Obviously it wasn’t mine, it belonged to somebody else, the one who’d lost it, rich or poor, and he might have been poor. Some worker who didn’t have anything to feed his wife and children with. But even if he was rich my duty remained the same. It was proper to return the coin and the best method, the only method, was to do it through an advertisement or through the police. I sent a letter to the chief of police enclosing what I’d found and beseeching him by the means at his disposal to return it into the hands of its true owner.

  I sent the letter off and ate a peaceful breakfast, I might even say a jubilant one. My conscience had waltzed so much the night before that it had lost its breath, but giving back the half doubloon was a window that opened onto the other side of morality. A wave of pure air came in and the lady breathed deeply. Ventilate your conscience! That’s all I can tell you. Nevertheless, if for no other reason, my act was a nice one because it expressed the proper scruples, the feelings of a delicate soul. That was what my inner lady was telling me, in a way that was austere and tender at the same time. That was what she was telling me as I leaned on the sill of the open window.

  “You did well, Cubas. You behaved perfectly. This air isn’t only pure, it’s balmy, it’s the breath of the eternal gardens. Do you want to see what you did, Cubas?”

  And the good lady took out a mirror and opened it: before my eyes. I saw, I clearly saw the half doubloon of the night before, round, shiny, multiplying all by itself—becoming ten-—then thirty—then five hundred—expressing in that way the benefits I would be given in life and in death by the simple act of restitution. And I was pouring out my whole being into the contemplation of that act, I was seeing myself in it again, I found myself good—great perhaps. A simple coin, eh? See what it means to have waltzed just a wee bit more.

  So I, Brás Cubas, discovered a sublime law, the law of the equivalencies of windows, and I established the fact that the method of compensating for a closed window is to open another, so that morality can continuously aerate one’s conscience. Maybe you don’t understand what’s entailed in that. Maybe you want something more concrete, a package, for example, a mysterious package. Well, here’s the mysterious package.

  LII

  The Mysterious Package

  The matter is that a few days later on my way to Botafogo I tripped over a package lying on the beach. That’s not quite exact. It was more of a kick than a trip. Seeing a bundle, not large but clean and neatly tied together with strong twine, something that looked like something, I thought about giving it a kick, just for the fun of it, and I kicked it, and the package resisted. I cast my eyes about. The beach was deserted. Some children were playing far off—beyond them a fisherman was drying his nets—no one could have seen my act. I bent over, picked up the package, and went on my way.

  I went on my way but not without some hesitation. It might have been a trick being played by some boys, I got the idea of taking what I’d found back to the beach, but I felt it and rejected the idea. A little farther on I changed course and headed home.

  “Let’s have a look,” I said as I entered my study.

  And I hesitated for a moment, because of shame, I think. The suspicion of a trick struck me again. It was certain that there’d been no outside witness there. But I had an urchin inside myself who would whisper, wink, grunt, kick, jeer, cackle, do devilish things if he saw me open the package and find a dozen old handkerchiefs or two dozen rotting guavas inside. It was too late. My curiosity was sharpened, as the reader’s must be. I unwrapped the bundle and I saw … found … counted … recounted nothing less than five cantos. Nothing less. Maybe ten mil-réis more. Five cantos in good banknotes and coins, all clean and in neat order, a rare find. I wrapped them up again. At dinner it seemed to me that one of the black boys was speak
ing to the other with his eyes. Had they spied on me? I asked them discreetly and concluded that they hadn’t. After dinner I went back to my study, examined the money, and laughed at my maternal worries regarding the five contos—I, who was well-off.

  In order not to think about it any more I went to Lobo Neves’ that night. He’d insisted that I not miss his wife’s receptions. There I ran into the chief of police. I was introduced to him. He immediately remembered the letter and the half doubloon I’d sent him a few days before. He revealed the matter. Virgília seemed to be savoring my act and everyone of those present came up with some analogous anecdote to which I listened with the impatience of a hysterical woman.

  The following night and during that whole week I gave as little thought as I could to the five cantos and, I must confess, I left them ever so peaceful in my desk drawer. I liked talking about everything except money, and principally money that had been found. It wasn’t a crime to find money, however, it was a happy thing, good luck, maybe even a stroke of Providence. It couldn’t be anything else. Five cantos aren’t lost the way you lose a pouch of tobacco. Five cantos are carried with thirty thousand feelings, you keep feeling them, you don’t take your eyes off them, or your hands, or your thoughts, and for them to be lost foolishly like that on a beach it has to be … Finding them can’t be a crime. Neither a crime, nor dishonor, nor anything that might sully a man’s character. They were something discovered, a lucky strike, like the grand prize, like a winning bet on the horses, like the stakes in an honest gambling game, and I might even say that my good luck was deserved, because I didn’t feel bad or unworthy of the rewards of Providence.

  “These five cantos,” I said to myself three weeks later, “must be used for some good deed, maybe as the dowry of some poor girl, or something like that… I’ll see …”