Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (32 page)

They were now passing the Passeio Público. Sofia wasn’t aware of it. She was staring at Rubião. It couldn’t be the scheme of an evil man, or did she think he was making fun of her? … Delirium, yes, that’s what it was. His words had the sincerity of a person who really sees or has seen the things he’s telling.

“I’ve got to get him out of here,” the young woman thought. And, gathering up courage, “Where can we be now?” she
asked him. “It’s time we went our separate ways. Look out that side. Where are we? It looks like the convent. We’re on the Largo da Ajuda. Tell the coachman to stop. Or, if you want, you can get out on the Largo da Carioca. My husband …”

“I’m going to make him an ambassador,” Rubião said. “Or a senator, if he wants. Senator is better. The two of you will stay here. If it were ambassador, I wouldn’t allow you to go with him, and the malicious tongues … You know the opposition I have, the gossip … Oh, rotten people! The Ajuda convent, you said? What do you have to do with that? Do you want to be a nun?”

“No. I said we’ve already passed the Ajuda convent. I’m going to drop you on the Largo da Carioca. Or shall we go on to my husband’s warehouse?”

Sofia went back to the second option. The coachman wouldn’t be suspicious, she could prove her innocence to Palha better, telling him everything, from the unexpected entry into the carriage down to the delirium. And what delirium might that be? Sofia thought that she herself could have been the reason, and that conjecture made her smile with pity.

“What for?” Rubião asked. “I’m getting off right here. It’s safer. Why make him suspect us and mistreat you? I could punish him, but I would always be left with the remorse of the harm he might do you. No, my lovely flower, my friend. If the wind dared touch your person, believe me, I would order it off as a wicked wind. You’re still not aware of my power, Sofia. Go on, confess.”

Since Sofia didn’t confess anything, Rubião called her beautiful and offered her the diamond solitaire he wore on his finger. She, however, while she loved jewels and had a special liking for single diamonds, fearfully turned down the offer.

“I understand your scruples,” he said, “but you’re not losing anything by them because you’re going to receive an even more beautiful stone and from the hand of your husband. I’m going to make you a duchess. Did you hear? The title is given to him, but you’re the cause. Duke … Duke of what? I’m going to look for a pretty title. Or I’ll let you choose it yourself, because it’s for you, it’s not for him, it’s for you, my sweet. You don’t have to pick it now, go home and think about it. Don’t worry over it. Send me word which one you think is the prettiest, and I’ll have the decree drawn up immediately. You can also do something
else. Pick it and tell me at our first meeting, in the usual place. I want to be the first to call you duchess. My darling duchess … The decree will come later. Duchess of my soul!”

“Yes, yes,” she said, bewildered, “but let’s tell the coachman to take us to Cristiano’s place.”

“No, I’m getting off here . . . Stop! Stop!”

Rubião raised the curtains, and the footman got down to open the door. Sofia, to remove any suspicions on his part, once more asked Rubião to go with her to her husband’s place. She told him he had to talk to him, urgently. Rubião looked a little surprised at her, at the footman, and at the street and answered no, he would come by later.

N
o sooner had they separated than a contrast came over them both.

Rubião, on the street, turned his head all about. Reality took hold of him, and the delirium vanished. He walked, lingered in front of a shop, crossed the street, stopped an acquaintance, asked him for news and opinions. An unconscious effort to shake himself free of the borrowed personality.

Sofia, on the other hand, with the surprise and the shock over, sank into a reverie. All the references and stories of Rubião’s seemed to be giving her longings—longings for what?—“longings for heaven,” which is what Father Bernardes said of the feelings of a good Christian. Different names flashed in the blue of that possibility. So many interesting details! Sofia reconstructed the old calèche where she’d entered rapidly, from which she’d got out trembling to slip into the hallway, go up the steps, and find a man—who told her the most delightfully sweet things in the world, and he repeated them now, next to her in the carriage, but it wasn’t, it couldn’t be Rubião. Who could it have been? Different names flashed in the blue of that possibility.

T
he news of Rubião’s mania spread. Some, not encountering him at the moment of his delirium, did experiments to see if the rumors were true, turning the conversation to French affairs and the emperor. Rubião slid into the pit and convinced them.

A
few months passed, the Franco-Prussian War came, and Rubião’s attacks become more acute and more frequent. When the mail from Europe arrived early, Rubião would leave Botafogo before breakfast and run to wait for the newspapers. He would buy the
Correspondência de Portugal
and read it right there under the street light. Whatever the news was, it felt like victory to him. He kept track of the dead and wounded and always came out with a large figure in his favor. The fall of Napoleon III was the capture of King Wilhelm for him, the September 4th revolution a banquet of Bonapartists.

At home, his old dinner friends didn’t get involved in dissuading him, nor did they confirm anything, to their collective shame. They would smile and change the subject. All, however, had their military ranks, Marshal Torres, Marshal Pio, Marshal Ribeiro, and they would answer to the title. Rubião saw them in uniform. He would order a reconnaissance, an attack, and it wasn’t necessary for them to go out to obey. Their host’s mind would take care of everything. When Rubião left the field of battle to return to the table, it was something else. Without silverware now, almost without china or crystal, even like that it appeared regally splendid to Rubião’s eyes. Poor scrawny hens were promoted to pheasants, humble hash and pitiful roasts bore the taste of the finest delicacies on earth. His tablemates would
make some comment among themselves—or to the cook—but Lucullus always dined with Lucullus. All the rest of the house, worn by time and neglect, faded rugs, shabby, broken furniture, soiled curtains, had nothing of its actual look but a glowing and magnificent one, and language was different too, rotund and copious, the same as thoughts, some of them extraordinary, like those of his late friend Quincas Borba—theories that he hadn’t understood when he’d heard them in Barbacena in times gone by and which he repeated now with lucidity and spirit—sometimes using the same phrases as the philosopher. What explanation was there for that repetition of the obscure, that knowledge of the inextricable, when the thoughts and the words seemed to have gone with the wind of other days? And why did all those reminiscences disappear with the return of his reason?

S
ofia’s compassion—with Rubião’s illness explained by the love he had for her—was a mixed feeling, neither pure sympathy nor hard egotism, but partaking of both. As long as she could avoid any situation identical to the one in the coupé, everything went well. At times, when Rubião was lucid, she would listen to him and talk to him with interest—simply because his illness, which brought on audacity during an attack, redoubled his timidity under normal circumstances. She didn’t smile, like Palha, when Rubião would ascend the throne or take command of an army. Believing herself the author of the illness, she forgave him for it. The idea of having been loved to the point of madness sanctified the man for her.

“W
hy doesn’t he get some treatment?” Dona Fernanda asked one night. She’d met him the year before. “He might be cured.”

“It doesn’t seem to be anything serious,” Palha put in. “He has those attacks, but they’re mild like that, the way you saw, delusions of grandeur that pass quickly. And you can see that, except for them, he converses perfectly. However, it’s possible … What does Your Excellency think?”

Teófilo, Dona Fernanda’s husband, answered yes, it was possible.

“What did he do, or what does he do now?” the deputy went on.

“Nothing, neither now nor before. He was rich—but a spendthrift. We met him when he was coming from Minas, and we were, in a manner of speaking, his guides to Rio de Janeiro, where he hadn’t been for many years. A good man. Always living in luxury, remember? But no wealth lasts forever when you start to touch the principal. That’s what he did. I don’t think he’s got too much left today…”

“You could save that little for him by having yourself named guardian while he gets treatment. I’m not a doctor, but it’s possible that this friend of yours could recover.”

“I don’t say that he couldn’t. It’s really a shame … He gets along with everybody and is always helpful. Did you know that he almost got to be a relative of ours? Yes. He wanted to marry Maria Benedita.”

“Speaking of Maria Benedita,” Dona Fernanda interrupted, “I almost forgot. I’ve got a letter from her to show you. It came yesterday. You probably know already that they’ll be returning soon, don’t you? Here it is.”

She handed the letter to Sofia, who opened it without enthusiasm and read it with boredom. It was more than an ordinary trans-Atlantic letter, it was a moral repository, an intimate and complete confession from a happy and thankful person. She spoke of the most recent episodes of the trip in a mixed-up fashion because the travelers themselves dominated everything,
and the most beautiful works of man or nature weren’t worth as much as the eyes that beheld them. Sometimes an incident in a hostelry or on the street would gobble up more paper and carry more interest than others in order to put her husband’s fine qualities in relief. Maria Benedita was as much in love or even more so than on the first day. At the end, timidly, in a postscript, asking that she not tell anyone, she confessed that she was going to be a mother.

Sofia folded the piece of paper, no longer with boredom but with resentment, and for two reasons that contradicted each other. But contradiction is part of this world. When that letter was compared to the ones she had received from Maria Benedita, it could have been said that she was nothing but an acquaintance with no ties of blood or affection. And yet she wouldn’t have cared to be the confidante of that joy whispered from across the ocean, full of minutiae, adjectives, exclamations, the name of Carlos Maria, the eyes of Carlos Maria, the remarks of Carlos Maria, finally the child of Carlos Maria. It looked like spite, and it almost made her believe in the complicity of Dona Fernanda.

Skillful, knowing enough to control herself in time, Sofia hid her spite and returned her cousin’s letter with a smile. She wanted to say that according to the contents Maria Benedita’s happiness must have been just the same as when she carried it off from here, but her voice never left her throat. Dona Fernanda was the one who took the task of a conclusion upon herself:

“It’s obvious that she’s happy!”

“It would seem so.”

I
f the following morning hadn’t been rainy, Sofia’s mood would have been different. The sun isn’t always the craftsman of good ideas, but at least it comes out and, in exchange for the spectacle, it alters feelings. When Sofia awoke, the rain was already
coming down heavily and without letup, and the sky and the sea were all one, the clouds so low, the haze so thick.

Tedium inside and out. There was nothing to broaden one’s view or give the soul some rest. Sofia put her soul into a cedar casket, closed the cedar one up in the lead casket of the day, and left it there, sincerely deceased. She didn’t know that the deceased think, that a swarm of new notions comes to take the place of the old, and that they emerge criticizing the world the way spectators come out of the theater criticizing the play and the actors. Her deceased soul felt that a few notions and feelings kept life going. They came out of a mixture but they had a common starting point—the letter of the day before and the memories it brought of Carlos Maria.

She really thought she’d left that hateful figure far behind, and there he was reappearing, smiling, staring at her, whispering in her ear the same words of a selfish and conceited loafer who had invited her once to do the waltz of adultery and had left her all alone in the middle of the ballroom. Around that figure came others, Maria Benedita, for example, a joke of a person that she’d gone to the country to bring out and give the luster of the city to and who’d forgotten all those benefits only to remember her ambitions. And Dona Fernanda, too, the sponsor of their love, who’d purposely brought Maria Benedita’s letter the day before with its confidential postscript. She wasn’t aware that her friend’s pleasure was enough to explain her forgetting the private part of the letter. Even less did she consider whether Dona Fernanda’s moral nature supported that supposition. Other thoughts and images came like that, and the first ones returned and they all went off, coming together and breaking apart. Among them was one remembrance of the night before. Dona Fernanda’s husband had wrapped Sofia in a great look of admiration. She really was in one of her best days. Her dress admirably enhanced the grace of her bustline, her narrow waist, and the delicate curve of her hips. It was foulard, straw-colored.

“The color of straw,
palha”
Sofia stressed, laughing, when Dona Fernanda praised it soon after coming in. “Straw,
palha
, to make me think of this gentleman.”

It’s not easy to hide the pleasure of praise. Her husband smiled, puffing up with vanity, trying to read the effect of that
tiny proof of love in the eyes of the others. Teófilo also praised the dress, but it was difficult to look at it without also looking at the body of the lady, and that gave rise to the long looks he cast on her, without lust, of course, and almost without insistence. So that memory of the day before, an uninvited gesture, an undesired admiration, came to counteract what Sofia was now thinking about the other woman’s wickedness.