Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (20 page)

A
ll of that had happened so spontaneously with Rubião that he only had time to reflect after the cab had begun to move. It appeared that he did manage to raise the window curtain. The old lady was going back inside. He could still see a bit of her arm. Rubião felt the advantage of not being an invalid. He leaned back, released a deep sigh from his chest, and looked out at the beach. He immediately leaned over. On the way there he had barely seen it.

“Do you like the view, sir?” the cabman asked, happy with the good customer he had.

“I think it’s quite pretty.”

“Haven’t you ever been here?”

“I think I was many years ago when I was in Rio de Janeiro for the first time. I’m from Minas … Stop, young man.”

The cabman halted his horse. Rubião got out and told him to follow along slowly.

It really was interesting. Great clumps of brush bursting up
out of the mud and placed there at the level of Rubião’s face made him have a desire to go into them. So close to the street! Rubião didn’t even feel the sun. He’d forgotten the sick man and the sick man’s mother. Just like that, yes—he said to himself—the sea should be all like that too, an expanse of earth and greenery, then it would be worth navigating. Beyond were more beaches, the Praia dos Lázaros and the Praia Sao Cristováo. Only a step away.

“Praia Formosa, beautiful beach,” he murmured, “a name well chosen.”

Meanwhile the beach was changing its aspect. He headed toward the Saco do Alferes and came to houses built along the sea. From time to time they weren’t houses but canoes beached on the mud or on dry land with their bottoms up. Next to one of those canoes he saw children in shirtsleeves and barefoot playing around a man lying belly down. They were all laughing. One was laughing more than the others because he couldn’t get the man’s foot down to the ground. He was a three-year-old toddler. He would grab the leg and pull on it until he got it down to ground level, but the man would make a movement and lift the foot and the boy up into the air.

Rubião stopped for a few minutes, watching. The fellow, seeing that he was an object of attention, redoubled his efforts in the game. It lost its natural aspect. The other, older boys stopped to look in surprise. But Rubião didn’t notice anything. He was seeing everything in a confused way. He walked along for a long time. He passed the Saco do Alferes, he passed Gamboa, he stopped by the English Cemetery with its old tombs climbing up the hillside, and he finally reached Saúde. He saw the long, narrow streets, houses crammed together in the distance and on top of the hills, alleyways, lots of ancient houses, some from the time of the king, eaten away, cracked, falling apart, paint covered with grime, but with life inside. And all that gave him a feeling of nostalgia … Nostalgia for tatters, for a life of poverty, humble and with no vexations. But it only lasted for a brief moment. The magician he carried inside himself transformed everything. It was so nice not to be poor!

R
ubião reached the end of the Rua da Saude. He was going V–along aimlessly with his eyes wandering and unattentive. Flush with him a woman passed, not pretty, not plain, lacking in elegance, more poor than well-off, but with fresh-looking features. She must have been twenty-five and was leading a boy by the hand. He got tangled up in Rubião’s legs.

“What are you doing, young man?” the woman said, pulling her son by the arm.

Rubião leaned over to help the little one up.

“Thank you very much, please excuse us,” she said, smiling. And she bowed to him.

Rubião tipped his hat and also smiled. The vision of a family came over him again. “Get married, and then tell me if I’m wrong!” He stopped, looked back, saw the young woman clicking along with the boy beside her adjusting his little steps to match his mother’s pace. Then, walking slowly, he thought about the several women he might well choose in order to perform the conjugal sonata, four hands around, serious music, regular and classical. He got to thinking of the major’s daughter, who only knew a few old mazurkas. Suddenly he was hearing the guitar of sin being plucked by Sofia’s fingers as she delighted and dazzled him at the same time. And away went all the chastity of his previous plan. He persevered once more, struggled to change compositions. He thought about the young woman in Saúde, such nice manners, with a small child by the hand.

T
he sight of the cab made him remember the sick man in Praia Formosa.

“Poor Freitas!” he sighed.

Immediately thereupon he thought about the money he’d left with the sick man’s mother and felt he’d done a good deed. Perhaps the idea of having given one or two notes too many hovered for a few seconds in our friend’s brain, but he quickly shook it off, not without being angry with himself, and, in order to forget about it completely, he exclaimed aloud:

“Fine old lady! Poor old lady!”

S
ince the idea kept coming back, Rubião quickly headed for the cab, got in and sat down, fleeing from himself.

“I took a good, long walk. But, yes, sir, it’s nice here, it’s interesting. These beaches, these streets, it’s different from other neighborhoods. I like it here. I’ve got to come back more.”

The cabman smiled to himself in such a particular way that our Rubião became suspicious. He couldn’t hit upon the reason for the smile. Maybe he’d let out some word that had a bad meaning in Rio de Janeiro. But he went over them and couldn’t find anything. They were all ordinary, everyday words. The cabman was still smiling, however, with the same look as at the beginning, half subservient, half rascally. Rubião was on the verge of questioning him, but he held back in time. It was the other man who picked up the conversation.

“So your worship is quite taken by the neighborhood?” he asked. “You’ve got to allow me not to believe you, without getting angry, because it’s not to offend your worship. I’m not one to upset a good customer. But I don’t believe you’re taken by the neighborhood.”

“Why?” Rubião ventured.

The cabman shook his head and repeated that he didn’t believe it—not because the neighborhood wasn’t worthy of appreciation, but because his customer naturally knew it quite well already. Rubião corrected that statement. He’d been there many years
before when he’d come to Rio de Janeiro at a different time, but he didn’t remember anything. And the cabman laughed. And as his customer went on explaining, he got more familiar, made negative signs with his nose, lips, hand.

“I know all about that,” he concluded. “I’m not a man who doesn’t see things. Your worship thinks that I didn’t see the way you looked at that young woman you passed just now? That’s enough to show that your worship has a good nose and good taste …”

Rubião, flattered, put on a little smile. But he immediately corrected himself.

“What young woman?”

“What did I tell you?” the man retorted. “Your worship is sharp and you do things right, but I’m a person who can keep a secret, and this here cab has been used for lots of these comings and goings. Not too many days ago I carried a handsome young man, very well dressed, a refined person—you know, a skirtchaser.”

“But I …,” Rubião interrupted.

But he had trouble holding back in. The supposition pleased him. The cabman thought he was playing innocent.

“Look, I can tell you,” he went on, “just like the young man from the Rua dos Inválidos. Your worship can rest easy, I won’t say a thing. That’s for other people. So, do you expect me to believe that it’s for pleasure that a person who has a cab at his disposal goes along from Praia Formosa to here on foot? Your worship got to the meeting place, but the person didn’t show up...”

“What person? I went to see a sick man, a friend who’s at death’s door.”

“Just like the young man from the Rua dos Inválidos,” the man repeated. “That one came to see a lady’s seamstress, as if he’d been a married man …”

“From the Rua dos Invalidos?” Rubião asked, only now aware of the name of the street.

“That’s all I’m saying,” the cabman replied. “He was from the Rua dos Invalidos, handsome, a young man with a mustache and big eyes, very big. Oh, if I were a woman I’d be capable of falling
in love with him … Her, I don’t know where she was from and I wouldn’t tell if I did. All I know is that she was quite a woman.”

And seeing that his customer was listening, wide-eyed:

“Oh, your worship has no idea! She was tall, with a good figure, her face half covered by a veil, a tasty dish. Just because people are poor doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate fine things.”

“But… what was it?” Rubião murmured.

“Come, now, what was it? He came the same as your worship, in my cab. He got out and went into a house with a grating. He said he was going to see a lady’s seamstress. Since I hadn’t asked him anything, and he’d traveled quiet during the whole trip, all wrapped up in himself, I caught onto the game right away. Now, it might just have been true, because there really is a seamstress who lives in a house on the Rua da Harmonia …”

“Da Harmonia?” Rubião repeated.

“This is bad! Your worship is pulling the secret out of me. Let’s change the subject. I’m not saying anything more.”

Rubião looked at the man with astonishment as he really did fall silent for two or three minutes, but immediately after he went on:

“Besides, there isn’t very much to say. The young man went in, I stayed waiting. A half hour later I saw the figure of a woman in the distance and I suspected right away that she was headed there. It happened just the way I said. She came, came along slow, sneaking looks on all sides. As she passed in front of the house, I can’t say, she didn’t even have to knock. It was like magic. The grating opened all by itself and she slipped inside. If I only knew what it was all about. Wouldn’t your worship let us earn a few pennies more? The price of the fare barely gives us enough to eat. We’ve got to do these little extras.”

N
o, it couldn’t have been she, Rubião reflected, at home, getting dressed in black.

Ever since he’d arrived, he could think of nothing else but the episode told him by the cabman. He tried to forget about it, putting papers in order or reading or snapping his fingers to watch Quincas Borba leap. But the picture wouldn’t go away. His reason told him that there were a lot of women with good figures, and there was no proof that the one on the Rua da Harmonia was she. But the good effect was short-lived. A little while later, sketched in the distance, head down, hesitant, was a person who was none other than Sofia herself, and she was walking and suddenly going through the door of a house, which closed immediately … The vision was such on one occasion that our friend remained staring at the wall as if the grating on the Rua da Harmonia were there. In his imagination he followed a series of actions: he knocked, entered, grabbed the seamstress by the throat, and demanded the truth or her life. The poor woman, threatened with death, confessed everything. She took him to see the lady, who was somebody else. It wasn’t Sofia. When Rubião came to, he felt annoyed.

“No, it couldn’t have been she.”

He put on his vest and was buttoning it by one of the windows that opened on the back at the moment when a caravan of ants was crossing the sill. How many of those had he seen pass before? But this time, he never found out why, he picked up a towel and gave the poor ants a couple of swats, killing a good portion of them. Maybe one of them seemed to him to have had “a good figure and a pretty body.” He immediately regretted his act and, really, what did the ants have to do with his suspicions? Fortunately a locust began singing so appropriately and so meaningfully that our friend stopped at the fourth button of his vest.
Soooo …fia, fia, fia, fia, fia, fia … Soooo …fia, fia, fia, fia … fia…

Oh, sublime and merciful care of nature, to place a living locust alongside twenty dead ants to compensate for them! That reflection is the reader’s. It can’t be Rubião’s. He wasn’t capable
of getting into things and drawing a conclusion from them—nor would he be doing it now as he reached the last button on his vest, all ears, all locust… Poor dead ants! Go now to your Gallic Homer who made you famous. The locust is the one who’s laughing now, correcting the text:

Vous marchiez? J’en suisfort aisé
.

Eh bun! Mourez maintenant
.

T
he dinner bell rang. Rubião composed his face so that his regulars (there were always four or five) wouldn’t notice anything. He found them in the parlor chatting, waiting. They all arose and went to shake his hand eagerly. Rubião had an inexplicable urge at that moment—to offer them his hand to kiss. He overcame it in time, surprised at himself.

A
t night he hurried to Flamengo. He couldn’t speak to Maria Benedita, who was upstairs with two girls from the neighborhood, friends of hers. Sofia came to receive him at the door and took him into the study, where two seamstresses were sewing mourning dresses. Her husband had just come in and hadn’t come down yet.

“Sit here,” she told him.

She took good care of him. She was divine. Her words came out loving and grave, mingled with friendly, open smiles. She
spoke about her aunt, her cousin, the weather, the servants, the theater, the water shortage, a multitude of things, common and uncommon, but as they passed through the young woman’s mouth they changed their nature and their aspect. Rubião listened in fascination. She, in order not to be idle, was sewing some ruffles, and when there was a pause in the conversation, Rubião was on the verge of devouring her agile hands as they seemed to be playing with the needle.

“Did you know that they’re forming a committee of women?” she asked.

“I didn’t know. What for?”

“Didn’t you read the news about that epidemic in a town in Alagoas?”