Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas

by Machado De Assis

  CI

  The Dalmatian Revolution

  It was Virgília who gave me the news of her husband’s political about-face one certain October morning between eleven o’clock and noon. She spoke to me about meetings, conversations, a speech …

  “So this time you’re going to become a baroness,” I interrupted.

  She turned down the corners of her mouth and shook her head from side to side. But that gesture of indifference was contradicted by something less definable, less clear, an expression of pleasure and expectation. I don’t know why, but I imagined that the imperial letter of nomination was capable of drawing her into virtue, I won’t say because of virtue in herself, but out of gratitude for her husband. Because she was sincerely in love with nobility. One of the greatest displeasures to come up in our life was the appearance of a dandy from a legation—let us call it the legation of Dalmatia—Count B. V., who chased after her for three months. That man, a genuine nobleman by blood, had turned Virgília’s head a little, for she, among other things, had a diplomatic vocation. I can’t get to what might have become of me if a revolution hadn’t broken out in Dalmatia that overthrew the government and cleaned out its embassies. The revolution was bloody, painful, formidable. With every ship arriving from Europe the newspapers described the horrors, calculated the bloodshed, counted the heads. Everybody was seething with indignation and pity … Not I. Inside I blessed the tragedy that had removed a pebble from my shoe. And, then, Dalmatia was so far away!

  CII

  At Rest

  But this same man who was overjoyed by the departure of the other, a while later practiced … No, I won’t talk about it on this page. Let that chapter wait for when my annoyance is at rest. A crass, low act, with no possible explanation … I repeat, I’m not going to recount the matter on this page.

  CIII

  Distraction

  No, sir, it’s not done. Excuse me, but it’s just not done. Dona Plácida was right. No gentleman arrives an hour late to the place where his lady is waiting for him. I came in panting, Virgília had left. Dona Plácida told me that she’d waited a long time, that she’d got annoyed, that she’d wept, that she’d sworn contempt for me, and other things that our housekeeper said with sobs in her voice, asking me not to abandon Iaiá, that it was being very unfair to a girl who’d sacrificed everything for me. I explained to her then that it was a mistake … And it wasn’t. I think that it was only distraction. A word, a conversation, an anecdote, anything. Only distraction.

  Poor Dona Plácida! She really was upset. She was walking back and forth shaking her head, breathing heavily, peeping through the blind. Poor Dona Plácida! With what skill had she tucked in, caressed, and pampered the wiles of our love! What a fertile imagination for making the hours more pleasurable and brief! Flowers, sweets—the delicate sweets of other times—and lots of laughter, lots of caressing, laughter and caressing that grew with time, as though she wanted to preserve our adventure or give it back its first bloom. Our confidante and housekeeper forgot nothing, not even lies, because she would mention signs and longings she hadn’t witnessed. Nothing, not even calumny, because once she even accused me of a new love. “You know I couldn’t love any other woman,” was my reply when Virgília spoke to me about something similar. And those simple words, with no protest or reproof, did away with Dona Plácida’s calumny and left her sad.

  “All right,” I said after a quarter of an hour. “Virgília’s got to recognize that I wasn’t at all to blame … Would you take a note to her right now?”

  “She must be very sad, the poor thing! Look, I don’t want anyone to die, but if you, sir, but if you ever got to where you could marry Iaiá, then, yes, you’d see what an angel she is!”

  I remember that I turned my face away and looked at the floor. I recommend that gesture to people who don’t have a response ready or even those who are reluctant to face the pupils of other eyes. In such cases some prefer to recite a stanza from the Lusiads, others adopt the recourse of whistling Norma. I’ll stick with the gesture mentioned. It’s simpler and it calls for less effort.

  Three days later everything had been explained. I imagine that Virgília was a little startled when I asked forgiveness for the tears she’d shed on that occasion. I can’t remember if inside I attributed them to Dona Plácida. Indeed, it could have been that Dona Plácida had wept when she saw her disappointment and through a phenomenon of vision the tears she had in her own eyes seemed to be falling from Virgília’s. Whatever it was, everything had been explained, but not forgiven, much less forgotten. Virgília had some harsh things to say to me, threatened me with separation, and ended up praising her husband. There, yes, you had a worthy man, quite superior to me, charming, a model of courtesy and affection. That’s what she said while I, sitting with my hands on my knees, looked at the floor, where a fly was dragging an ant that was biting its leg. Poor fly! Poor ant!

  “But, haven’t you got anything to say?” Virgília asked, standing over me.

  “What is there for me to say? I’ve explained everything. You persist in getting angry. What is there for me to say? Do you know what I think? I think you’re tired, that you’re bored, that you want to stop …”

  “Exactly!”

  She put on her hat, her hand trembling, enraged … “Goodbye, Dona Plácida,” she shouted to the back. Then she went to the door. She was going to leave. I grabbed her by the waist. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” I said to her. Virgília still struggled to leave. I held her back, asked her to stay, to forget about it. She came away from the door and sat down on the settee. I sat down beside her, told her a lot of loving things, some humble, some funny. I’m not sure whether our lips got as close as a cambric thread or even closer. That’s a matter of dispute. I do remember that in the agitation one of Virgília’s earrings had fallen off and I leaned over to pick it up and that the fly of a little while back had climbed onto the earring still carrying the ant on its leg. Then I, with the inborn delicacy of a man of our century, took that pair of mortified creatures into the palm of my hand. I calculated the distance between my hand and the planet Saturn and asked myself what interest there could be in such a wretched episode. If you conclude from it that I was a barbarian, you’re wrong, because I asked Virgília for a hairpin in order to separate the two insects. But the fly guessed my intention, opened its wings, and flew off. Poor fly! Poor ant. And God saw that it was good, as Scripture says.

  CIVIT Was He!

  I gave the hairpin back to Virgília and she returned it to her hair and made ready to leave. It was late, it had already struck three. Everything was forgotten arid forgiven. Dona Plácida, who’d been watching for the right moment for leaving, suddenly shut the window and exclaimed:

  “Holy Mother of God! Here comes Iaiá’s husband!”

  The moment of terror was short but complete. Virgília turned the color of the lace on her dress. She ran to the door of the bedroom. Dona Plácida, who’d closed the blind, was also trying to close the inside door. I got ready to wait for Lobo Neves. That short instant passed. Virgília returned to her senses, pushed me into the bedroom, told Dona Plácida to go back to the window. The confidante obeyed.

  It was he. Dona Plácida opened the door to him with all sorts of exclamations of surprise. “You here, sir? Honoring the house of your old woman? Please come in. Guess who’s here … You don’t have to guess, that’s the only reason you came … Come out, Iaiá.”

  Virgília, who was in a corner, ran to her husband. I was spying on them through the keyhole. Lobo Neves came in slowly, pale, quiet, with no furor, and cast a glance about the room.

  “What’s this?” Virgília exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was passing and I saw Dona Plácida in the window so I came to say hello to her.”

  “Thank you very much,” Dona Plácida hastened to say. “And they say old women don’t amount to anything … Just look! Iaiá looks jealous.” And, stroking her, “This angel is the one w
ho’s never forgotten old Plácida. Poor thing! She’s got her mother’s exact face. Sit down, sir …”

  “I can’t stay.”

  “Are you going home?” Virgília asked. “We can leave together.”

  “I am.”

  “Let me have my hat. Dona Piácida.”

  “Here it is.”

  Dona Plácida went to get a mirror, opened it in front of her, Virgília put on her hat, tied the ribbons, fixed her hair, talking to her husband, who wasn’t saying anything in reply. Our good old lady was prattling too much. It was a way of covering up the shaking of her body. Virgília, having overcome the first moment, had regained control of herself.

  “All set,” she said. “Goodbye, Dona Plácida. Don’t forget to come by, do you hear?” The other one promised she would and opened the door for them.

  CV

  The Equivalency of Windows

  Dona Plácida closed the door and dropped onto a chair. I immediately left the bedroom and took two steps on my way out to the street to tear Virgília away from her husband. That was what I said and it was good that I said it because Dona Plácida held me back by the arms. After a time I got to imagine that I’d only said it so she would hold me back. But simple reflection is enough to show that after ten minutes in the bedroom it could only have been a most genuine and sincere gesture. And that was because of the famous law of the equivalency of windows that I had the satisfaction of discovering and formulating in Chapter LI. It was necessary to air out one’s conscience. The bedroom was a closed window. I opened another with the gesture of leaving, and I breathed.

  CVI

  A Dangerous Game

  I breathed and sat down. Dona Plácida was clamoring with exclamations and wailing. I listened without saying anything. I was pondering to myself whether it might have been better to have shut Virgília up in the bedroom and to have stayed in the parlor. But I immediately realized that it would have been worse. It would have confirmed suspicions, reached the point of an explosion and a bloody scene … It had been so much better that way. But what about afterwards? What was going to happen to Virgília? Would her husband kill her, beat her, lock her up, throw her out? Those questions ran slowly through my brain, the way little specks and dark commas run across the field of vision of sick or tired eyes. They came and went, with their dry and tragic look, and I couldn’t grasp one of them and say: It’s you, you and no other.

  Suddenly I saw a black shape. It was Dona Plácida, who’d gone inside, put on her cloak, and was offering to go to the Lobo Neves house for me. I cautioned her that it was risky, because he would be suspicious of such a quick visit.

  “Don’t worry,” she interrupted. “I’ll know how to do it. If he’s at home I won’t go in.”

  She left. I remained there pondering what had happened and the possible consequences. In the end it seemed to me that it was playing a dangerous game and I asked myself if it wasn’t time to get up and take a little walk. I felt taken by a longing for marriage, by a desire to straighten my life out. Why not? My heart still had things to explore. I didn’t feel incapable of a chaste, austere, pure love. In reality, adventures are the torrential and giddy part of life, the exception, that is. I was weary of them. I may even have felt the prick of some remorse. As soon as I thought about that I let myself go to follow my imagination. I immediately saw myself married, alongside an adorable woman, looking at a baby sleeping in the arms of a nursemaid, all of us in the back of a shady green yard, and peeping at us through the trees was a strip of blue sky, an extremely blue sky …

  CVII

  A Note

  “Nothing happened, but he suspects something. He’s very serious and not talking. He just went out. He smiled only once, at Nhonhô, after staring at him for a long time, frowning. He didn’t treat me either badly or well. I don’t know what’s going to happen. God willing, this will pass. Be very cautious for now, very cautious.”

  CVIII

  Perhaps Not Understood

  There’s the drama, there’s the tip of Shakespeare’s tragic ear. That little scrap of paper, scribbled on in part, crumpled by hands, was a document for analysis, which I’m not going to do in this chapter, or in the next, or perhaps in all the rest of the book. Could I rob the reader of the pleasure of noting for himself the coldness, the perspicacity, and the spirit of those few lines jotted down in haste and, behind then, the storm of a different brain, the concealed rage, the despair that brings on constraint and meditation, because it must be resolved in the mud, in blood, or in tears?

  As for me, if I tell you that I read the note three or four times that day, believe it, because it’s the truth. If I tell you, further, that I reread it the next day, before and after breakfast, you can believe it; it’s the naked truth. But if I tell you the upset I had, you might doubt that assertion a bit and not accept it without proof. Neither then nor even now have I been able to make out what I felt. It was fear and it wasn’t fear. It was pity and it wasn’t pity. It was vanity and it wasn’t vanity. In the end, it was love without love, that is, without delirium, and all that made for a rather complex and vague combination, something that you probably don’t understand, as I didn’t understand it. Let’s just suppose that I didn’t say anything.

  CIX

  The Philosopher

  Since it’s known that I reread the letter before and after breakfast, it’s known, therefore, that I had breakfast, and all that remains to be said is that the breakfast was one of the most frugal of my life: an egg, a slice of bread, a cup of tea. I haven’t forgotten that small circumstance. In the midst of so many important things that were obliterated, that breakfast escaped. The main reason might have been my disaster, but it wasn’t. The main reason was a reflection made to me by Quincas Borba, who visited me that day. He told me that frugality wasn’t necessary in order to understand Humanitism, much less to practice it. That philosophy enjoyed easy accommodation with the pleasures of life, including table, theatre, and love, and that, quite the contrary, frugality could be an indication of a certain tendency toward asceticism, which was the perfect expression of human idiocy.

  “Look at Saint John,” he went on, “he lived off grasshoppers in the wilderness instead of growing peacefully fat in the city while making Pharisaism in the synagogue lose weight.”

  God spare me the narration of Quincas Borba’s story, which I listened to in its entirety on that sad occasion, a long, complicated yet interesting story. And since I won’t be telling the story, I’ll also dispense with describing his person, quite different from the one that had appeared to me on the Passeio Público. I shall be silent. I will only say that if a man’s main characteristic isn’t in his features but in his clothing, he wasn’t Quincas Borba: he was a judge without a robe, a general without a uniform, a businessman without a budget. I noted the perfection of his frock coat, the whiteness of his shirt, the shine of his shoes. His very voice, hoarse before, seemed to have been restored to its original sonority. As for his mannerisms, without having lost the previous vivacity, they no longer had the disorder and were subject to a certain method. But I don’t wish to describe him. If I were to speak, for example, about his gold stickpin and the quality of the leather of his shoes, it would initiate a description that I am omitting in the name of brevity. Be satisfied to know that his shoes were of patent leather. Know, furthermore, that he’d inherited a few braces of contos from an old uncle in Barbacena.

  My spirits (allow me a child’s comparison here!), my spirits on that occasion were a kind of shuttlecock. Quincas Borba’s narration hit it, it went up, and when it was about to drop, Virgília’s note hit it again, and it was hurled into the air once more. It would descend and the episode on the Passeio Público would receive it with another stroke, equally as firm and effective. I don’t think I was born for complex situations. That pushing and shoving of opposite things was getting me off balance. I had an urge to wrap up Quincas Borba, Lobo Neves, and Virgília’s note in the same philosophy and send them to Aristotle as
a gift. Nevertheless, our philosopher’s narrative was instructive. I especially admired the talent for observation with which he described the gestation and growth of vice, the inner struggles, the slow capitulations, the covering of slime.

  “Look,” he observed. “The first night I spent on the São Francisco stairs, I slept right through as though it had been the softest down. Why? Because I went gradually from a bed with a mattress to a wooden cot, from my own bedroom to the police station, from the police station to the street …”

  Finally, he wanted to explain the philosophy to me. I asked him not to. “I’m terribly preoccupied today and I wouldn’t pay attention. Come back another time. I’m always home.” Quincas Borba smiled in a sly way. Maybe he knew about my affair, but he didn’t say anything more. He only spoke these last words to me at the door:

  “Come to Humanitism. It’s the great bosom for the spirit, the eternal sea into which I dove to bring out the truth. The Greeks made it come out of a well! What a base conception! A well! But that’s precisely why they never hit upon it. Greeks, Sub-Greeks, Anti-Greeks, the whole long series of mankind has leaned over that well to watch truth come out, but it isn’t there. They wore out ropes and buckets. Some of the more audacious ones went down to the bottom and brought up a toad. I went directly to the sea. Come to Humanitism.”