The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (14 page)

My father was astounded at the outcome and I’d like to think that there was nothing else that caused his death. So many were the castles that he’d built, ever so many the dreams, that he couldn’t bear to see them demolished without suffering a great shock to his organism. At first he refused to believe it. A Cubas! A twig of the illustrious tree of the Cubases! And he said that with such conviction that I, aware by then of our cooperage, forgot the fickle lady for a moment to think only about that phenomenon, not strange, but curious: imagination raised up to certitude.

“A Cubas!” he repeated to me the next morning at breakfast.

It wasn’t a joyful breakfast. I myself was dropping from lack of sleep. I’d stayed awake a good part of the night. Because of love? Impossible. One doesn’t love the same woman twice, and I, who would love that one some time later, wasn’t held at that time by any other bond than a
passing fantasy, a certain obedience to my own fatuousness. And that was enough to explain my wakefulness. It was spite, a sharp little spite with the prick of a pin, which disappeared with cigars, pounding fists, scattered reading, until dawn broke, the most tranquil of dawns.

But I was young, I had the cure in myself. It was my father who couldn’t bear the blow so easily. When I think about it, it might be that he didn’t die precisely because of the disaster, but the disaster surely complicated his final ailments. He died four months latter—disheartened, sad, and with an intense and continuous preoccupation, something like remorse, a fatal disenchantment that went along with his rheumatism and coughing. He had a half hour of joy all the same. It was when one of the ministers came to call. I saw that he had—I remember it well—I saw that he had the pleased smile of other days and a concentration of light in his eyes that was, so to speak, the last flash of an expiring soul. But the sadness returned immediately, the sadness or dying without seeing me in some high position as befitted me.

“A Cubas!”

He died a few days after the minister’s visit one morning in May, between his two children, Sabina and me, along with Uncle Ildefonso and my brother-in-law. He died in spite of the physicians’ science or our love or our care, which was great, or anything else. He was to die and he died.

Sobs, tears, the house all prepared, black velvet over the doorways, a man who came to dress the corpse, another who took measurements for the coffin, bier, candle holders, invitations, guests slowly entering, stepping softly, shaking hands with the family, some sad, all serious and silent, priest and sacristan, prayers, the sprinkling of holy water, nailing shut the coffin, six people lifting it and carrying it down the steps in spite of the cries, sobs, the new tears on the part of the
family, and going up to the hearse, placing it on top and tying it down, the hearse rolling along, and the carriages, one by one … What looks like a simple inventory here are notes I’d taken for a sad and banal chapter that I won’t write.

Let the reader have a look at us now, a week after my father’s death—my sister sitting on a sofa—Cotrim a little in front of her, leaning against a sideboard, his arms folded and nibbling on his mustache—I walking back and forth staring at the floor. Deep mourning. Profound silence.

“But, after all,” Cotrim was saying, “this house can’t be worth much more than thirty
cantos
. Let’s make it thirty-five …”

“It’s worth fifty,” I figured. “Sabina knows it cost fifty-eight …”

“It could have cost sixty,” Cotrim replied, “but it doesn’t follow that it was worth it, much less that it’s worth it today. You know that houses have gone down in price over the years. Look, if this one is worth the fifty
cantos
, how much do you think the one you want for yourself, the country house, is worth?”

“Let’s not talk about that. It’s an old house.”

“Old?” Sabina exclaimed, lifting her hands to the ceiling.

“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.

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 …

“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 …

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 men 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.

“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.