XXIII
Sad, But Short
I came. I won’t deny that when I caught sight of my native city I had a new sensation. It was not the effect of my political homeland, it was that of” the place of my childhood, the street, the tower, the fountain on the corner, the woman in a shawl, the black street sweeper, the things and scenes of boyhood engraved in my memory. Nothing less than a re-birth. The spirit, like a bird, didn’t take into consideration the flow of years, it fluttered toward the original spring and went to drink its cool, pure waters, still not mingled with the torrent of life.
If you take careful note you’ll see a commonplace there. Another commonplace, sadly common, was the family’s consternation. My father embraced me in tears. “Your mother isn’t going to live,” he told me. Indeed, it wasn’t the rheumatism that was killing her anymore, it was a stomach cancer. The poor thing was suffering cruelly because cancer is indifferent to a person’s virtues. My sister Sabina, married by then to Cotrim, was on the point of dropping from fatigue. Poor girl! She got only three hours of sleep a night, no more. Even Uncle João was downcast and sad. Dona Eusébia and some other ladies were there, too, no less sad and no less dedicated.
“My son!”
The pain held back its pincers for a moment. A smile lighted the face of the sick woman over whom death was beating its eternal wings. It was less a face than a skull. Its beauty had passed like a bright day. The bones, which never grow thin, were left. I could hardly recognize her. It had been eight or nine years since we’d seen each other. Kneeling by the foot of the bed with her hands in mine, I remained mute and still, not daring to speak because every word would have been a sob and we were afraid to tell her of the end. Vain fear! She knew that she was close to the end. She told me so. We found out the next morning.
Her agony was long, long and cruel with a meticulous, cold, repetitious cruelty that filled me with pain and bewilderment. It was the first time I’d seen someone die. I’d only known death by hearsay. At most I’d seen it, petrified already, in the face of some corpse I accompanied to the cemetery, or I carried the idea of it wrapped up in the rhetorical amplifications of professors of ancient matters—the treacherous death of Caesar, the austere death of Socrates, the proud death of Cato, But that duel between to be and not to be, death in action, painful, contracted, convulsive, without any political or philosophical apparatus, the death of a loved one, that was the first time I’d faced it. I didn’t weep. I remember that I hadn’t wept during the whole spectacle. My eyes were dull, my throat tight, my awareness open-mouthed. Why? A creature so docile, so tender, so saintly, who’d never caused a tear of displeasure to fall, a loving mother, and immaculate wife, why did she have to die like that, handled, bitten by the teeth of a pitiless illness? I must confess that it all seemed obscure to me, incongruous, insane …
A sad chapter. Let’s pass on to a happier one.
XXIV
Short, But Happy
I was prostrate. And this in spite of the fact that I was a faithful compendium of triviality and presumption at that time. The problem of life and death had never weighed on my brain. Never until that day had I peered into the abyss of the Inexplicable. I lacked the essential thing, which is a stimulus, a sudden impulse …
To tell you the truth, I mirrored the opinions of a hairdresser I’d met in Modena who was distinguished by having absolutely none. He was the flower of hairdressers. No matter how long the operation on the coiffure took, he never got angry. He would intersperse the combing with lots of maxims and jests, full of a certain malice, a zest… He had no other philosophy. Nor did I. I’m not saying that the university hadn’t taught me some philosophical truths. But I’d only memorized the formulas, the vocabulary, the skeleton. I treated them as I had Latin: I put three lines from Virgil in my pocket, two from Horace, and a dozen moral and political locutions for the needs of conversation. I treated them the way I treated history and jurisprudence. I picked up the phraseology of all things, the shell, the decoration …
Perhaps I’m startling the reader with the frankness with which I’m exposing and emphasizing my mediocrity. Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man. In life the gaze of public opinion, the contrast of interests, the struggle of greed all oblige people to keep quiet about their dirty linen, to disguise the rips and stitches, not to extend to the world the revelations they make to their conscience. And the best part of the obligation comes when, by deceiving others, a man deceives himself, because in such a case he saves himself vexation, which is a painful feeling, and hypocrisy, which is a vile vice. But in death, what a difference! What a release! What freedom! Oh, how people can shake off their coverings, leave their spangles in the gutter, unbutton themselves, unpaint themselves, undecorate themselves, confess flatly what they were and what they’ve stopped being! Because, in short, there aren’t any more neighbors or friends or enemies or acquaintances or strangers. There’s no more audience. The gaze of public opinion, that sharp and judgmental gaze, loses its virtue the moment we tread the territory of death. I’m not saying that it doesn’t reach here and examine and judge us, but we don’t care about the examination or the judgment. My dear living gentlemen and ladies, there’s nothing as incommensurable as the disdain of the deceased.
XXV
In Tijuca
Drat! My pen got away from me there and slipped into the emphatic. Let’s be simple, as simple as the life I led in Tijuca during the first weeks after my mother’s death.
On the seventh day, when the funeral mass was over, I gathered together a shotgun, some books, clothing, cigars, a houseboy—the Prudêncio of Chapter XI—and went off to establish myself in an old house we owned. My father made an effort to make me change my mind, but I couldn’t and didn’t want to obey him. Sabina wanted me to go live with her for a while—two weeks at least. My brother-in-law was on the point of carrying me off forcibly. He was a good lad, that Cotrim. He’d gone from profligacy to circumspection. Now he was a food merchant, toiling from morning till night with perseverance. In the evening, sitting by the window and twirling his sideburns, that was all he had on his mind. He loved his wife and the son they had at that time who died a few years later. People said he was tightfisted.
I had given up everything. I was in a state of shock. I think it was around that time that hypochondria began to bloom in me, that yellow, solitary, morbid flower with an intoxicating and subtle odor. “’Tis good to be sad and say nothing!” When those words of Shakespeare’s caught my attention I must confess that I felt an echo in myself, a delightful echo. I remember that I felt an echo in myself, a delightful echo. I remember that I was sitting under a tamarind tree with the poet’s book in my hands and my spirit was even more downcast than the character’s,—or crestfallen, as we say of sad hens. I clutched my taciturn grief to my breast with a singular sensation, something that could be called the sensuality of boredom. The sensuality of boredom: memorize that expression, reader, keep it, examine it, and if you can’t get to understand it you may conclude that you’re ignorant of one of the most subtle sensations of this world and that time.
Sometimes I would go hunting, at other times sleep, and at others read—I read a lot—other times, well, I did nothing. I let myself ramble from idea to idea, from imagination to imagination, like a vagrant or hungry butterfly. The hours dripped away, one by one, the sun set, the shadows of night veiled the mountain and the city. No one came to visit me. I had expressly asked to be left alone. One day, two days, three days, a whole week spent like that without saying a word was enough for me to shake off Tijuca and rejoin the bustle. Indeed, at the end of a week I’d had more than enough of solitude. My grief had abated. My spirits were no longer satisfied with only shotgun and books or with the view of the woods and the sky. Youth was reacting, it was necessary to live. I packed away the problem of life and death, the poet’s hypochondriacs, the shirts, the meditations, the neckties in a trunk and I was about to close it when the black boy Prudêncio told me
that the day before a person of my acquaintance had moved into a purple house a couple of hundred steps away from ours.
“Who?”
“Does Little Mastér remember Dona Eusehia maybe?”
“I remember … Is it she?”
“She and her daughter. They got in yesterday morning.”
The episode from 1814 came to me immediately and I felt annoyed. But I called my attention to the fact that: events proved me right. Actually, it had been impossible to prevent the intimate relations between Vilaça and the sergeant-major’s sister. Even before I sailed there was already a mysterious wagging of tongues about the birth of a girl. My Uncle João wrote me later that Vilaça, when he died, had left a good legacy to Dona Eusébia, something that caused a lot of talk in the neighborhood. Uncle João himself, greedy when it came to scandal, didn’t talk about anything else in the letter—several pages long, by the by. Events had proved me right. Even though they had, however, 1814 was a long way back and with it Vilaça’s mischief and the kiss in the shrubbery. Finally, no close relations existed between her and me. I made that reflection to myself and finished closing the trunk.
“Isn’t the Little Master going to visit Missy Dona Eusébia?” Prudêncio asked me. “She was the one who dressed the body of my departed mistress.”
I remembered that I’d seen her among other ladies on the occasion of the death and the burial. I didn’t know, however, that she’d lent my mother that final kindness. The houseboy’s reflection was reasonable. I owed her a visit. I decided to do it at once and then leave.
XXVI
The Author Hesitates
Suddenly I heard a voice. “Hello, my boy, this is no life for you!” It was my father, who was corning with two proposals in his pocket. I sat down on the trunk and welcomed him without any fuss. He stood looking at me for a few moments and then extended his hand in an emotional gesture.
“My son, make adjustment to the will of God.”
“I’ve already adjusted,” was my answer, and I kissed his hand.
He hadn’t had lunch. We lunched together. Neither of us mentioned the sad reason for my withdrawal. Only once did we talk about it, in passing, when my father brought the conversation around to the Regency, It was then that he mentioned the letter of condolence that one of the Regents had sent him. He had the letter with him, already rather wrinkled, perhaps from having been read to so many other people. I think he said it was one of the Regents. He read it to me twice.
“I’ve already gone to thank him for that mark of consideration,” my father said, “and I think you should go, too …”
“I?”
“You. He’s an important man. He takes the place of the Emperor these days. Besides, I’ve brought an idea with me, a plan, or … yes, I’ll tell you everything. I’ve got two plans: a position as deputy and a marriage.”
My father said that slowly, pausing, and not in the same tone of voice but giving the words a form and placement with an end to digging them deeper into my spirit. The proposals, however, went so much against my latest feelings that I really didn’t get to understand them, My father didn’t flag and he repeated them, stressing the position and the bride.
“Do you accept?”
“I don’t understand politics,” I said after an instant. “As for the bride …, let me live like the bear I am.”
“But bears get married,” he replied.
“Then bring me a she-bear. How about the Ursa Major?” My father laughed and after laughing went back to speaking seriously. A political career was essential for me, he said, for twenty or more reasons, which he put forth with singular volubility, illustrating them with examples of people we knew. As for the bride, all I had to do was see her. If I saw her, I would immediately go ask her father for her hand, immediately, without waiting a single day. In that way first he tried fascination, then persuasion, then intimation. I gave no answer, sharpening the tip of a toothpick or making little balls of bread crumbs, smiling or reflecting. And, to say it outright, neither docile nor rebellious concerning the proposals. I felt confused. One part of me said yes, that a beautiful wife and a political position were possessions worthy of appreciation. Another said no, and my mother’s death appeared to me as an example of the fragility of things, of affections, of family …
“I’m not leaving here without a final answer,” my father said. “Fi-nal an-swer!” he repeated, drumming out the syllables with his finger.
He drank the last drops of his coffee, relaxed, started talking about everything, the senate, the chamber, the Regency, the restoration, Evaristo, a coach he intended to buy, our house in Matacavalos … I remained at a corner of the table writing crazily on a piece of paper with the stub of a pencil. I was tracing a word, a phrase, a line of poetry, a nose, a triangle, and I kept repeating them over and over, without any order, at random, like this:
All of it mechanically and, nonetheless, there was a certain logic, a certain deduction. For example, it was the virumque that made me get to the name of the poet himself, because of the first syllable. I was going to write virumque—and Virgil came out, then I continued:
My father, a little put off by that indifference, stood up, came over to me, cast his eyes onto the paper …
“Virgil!” he exclaimed. “That’s it, my boy. Your bride just happens to be named Virgília.”
XXVII
Virgília?
Virgília? But, then, was it the same lady who some years later …? The very same. It was precisely the lady who was to be present during my last days in 1869 and who before, long before, had played an ample part in my most intimate sensations. At that time she was only fifteen or sixteen years old. She was possibly the most daring creature of our race and, certainly, the most willful. I shan’t say that she was already first in beauty, ahead of the other girls of the time, because this isn’t a novel, where the author gilds reality and closes his eyes to freckles and pimples. But I won’t say either that any freckle or pimple blemished her face, no. She was pretty, fresh, she came from the hands of nature full of that sorcery, uncertain and eternal, that an individual passes to another individual for the secret ends of creation. That was Virgília, and she was fair, very fair, ostentatious, ignorant, childish, full of mysterious drives, a lot of indolence, and some devoutness—devoutness or maybe fear. I think fear.
There in a few lines the reader has the physical and moral portrait of the person who was to influence my life later on. She was all that at sixteen. You who read me, if you’re still alive when these pages come to life—you who read me, beloved Virgília, have you noticed the difference between the language of today and the one I first used when I saw you? Believe me, it was just as sincere then as now. Death didn’t make me sour, or unjust.
“But,” you’re probably saying, “how can you discern the truth of those times like that and express it after so many years?”
Ah! So indiscreet! Ah! So ignorant! But it’s precisely that which has made us lords of the earth; it’s that power of restoring the past to touch the instability of our impressions and the vanity of our affections. Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. No. He’s a thinking erratum, that’s what he is. Every season of life is an edition that corrects the one before and which will also be corrected itself until the definitive edition, which the publisher gives to the worms gratis.
XXVIII
Provided That…
“Virgília?” I interrupted. “Yes, sir. That’s the name of the bride. An angel, you ninny, an angel without wings. Picture a girl like that, this tall, a lively scamp, and a pair of eyes … Dutra’s daughter …”
“What Dutra is that?”
“Councilor Dutra. You don’t know him, lots of political influence. All right, do you accept?”
I didn’t answer right off. I stared at my shoetops for a few seconds. Then I declared that I was willing to think both things over, the candidacy and the marriage, provided that…
“Provided that what?”
“
Provided that I’m not obliged to accept both things. I think that I can be a married man and a public man separately …”
“All public men have to be married,” my father interrupted sententiously. “But do what you will. It’s all right with me. I’m sure that seeing will be believing! Besides, bride and parliament are the same thing … that is, not… you’ll find out later … Go ahead. I accept the delay, provided that…”
“Provided that what?” I interrupted, imitating his voice.
“Oh, you rascal! Provided that you don’t let yourself sit there useless, obscure, and sad. I didn’t put out money, care, drive not to see you shine the way you should and as suits you and all of us. Our name has to continue; continue it and make it shine even more. Look, I’m sixty, but if it were necessary to start life over I wouldn’t hesitate a single minute. Fear obscurity, Brás, flee from the negligible. Men are worth something in different ways, and the surest one of all is being worthy in the opinion of other men. Don’t squander the advantages of your position, your means …”
And the magician went ahead waving a rattle in front of me as they used to do when I was little in order to make me walk more quickly, and the flower of hypochondria retreated into its bud to leave another flower less yellow and not at all morbid—the love of fame, the Brás Cubas poultice.
XXIX
The Visit
My father had won. I was prepared to accept diploma and marriage, Virgília and the Chamber of Deputies. “The two Virgílias,” he said with a show of political tenderness. I accepted them. My father gave me two strong hugs. It was his own blood that he was finally recognizing.
Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas Page 8