Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (34 page)

“Do you think he’ll get well?” Dona Fernanda asked, paying no attention to Dr. Falcão’s question.

Dr. Falcão was a deputy and a physician, a friend of the family, a wise, skeptical, and cold man. Dona Fernanda had asked him to do her the favor of examining Rubião shortly after the latter had been moved to the house on the Rua do Principe.

“Yes, I think he’ll get well as long as he receives regular treatment. It could be that the illness has no antecedents in his family. Have him go see a specialist. But don’t you want to know what my interesting discovery was?”

“What was it?”

“His illness might be related to a person of your acquaintance,” he answered, smiling.

“Who?”

“Dona Sofia.”

“How’s that?”

“He spoke about her with great enthusiasm, told me that she was the most splendid woman in the world and that he was going to make her a duchess, since he couldn’t make her empress. But they shouldn’t fool with him, that he was capable of doing what his uncle did, get divorced and marry her. I gathered that he had a passion for the young lady. And then the intimacy, Sofia here, Sofia there … You have to excuse me, but I think the two of them had been lovers …”

“Oh, no!”

“Dona Fernanda, I think they were lovers. What’s so strange? I scarcely know her. You don’t seem to have known her for a long time or to have been intimate friends with her. It could be that they were lovers and that some violent passion … Let’s suppose that she threw him out of the house … It’s true that he has delusions of grandeur, but everything might be connected …”

Dona Fernanda wasn’t looking at him, annoyed at hearing that
supposition on his part. She avoided discussing it because of the delicacy of the matter. She found the suspicion baseless, absurd, unlikely. She wouldn’t have believed that spurious love even if she’d heard it from Rubião himself. A crackbrain, in short. Even if he weren’t, it was still probable that she wouldn’t believe him. She couldn’t believe that Sofia could have been in love with that man, not because of him, but because of her, so correct and pure. It was impossible. She wanted to defend her. But in spite of her close relationship with Dr. Falcão, she changed the subject a second time and repeated the question of a while back.

“Do you think he’ll get well, then?”

“He might, but my examination’s not enough. You know that in these matters a specialist is best.”

A while later, as he left, Falcão smiled at Dona Fernanda’s resistance in accepting the hypothesis. “There surely must have been something,” he said to himself. “A good appearance and if he’s not a dandy, he’s good-looking, and he’s got fire in his eyes. Surely…” And he repeated some of Rubião’s comments, recalled his expression and the tender tone of his voice, and the suspicion kept growing. “Surely…” Now it was impossible for them not to have been lovers. Dona Fernanda’s opposition seemed ingenuous to him—unless it was really a way to change the subject and not touch on the matter. It must have been that…

At that point, without meaning to, the deputy stood still. A new suspicion attacked his mind. After a few quick moments, he shook his head voluntarily as if to deny himself, as if to find himself absurd, and he continued walking. But the suspicion was insistent, and one that really occupies a man’s inner part doesn’t pay any attention to his head or gestures. “Who knows, maybe Dona Fernanda herself was sighing over him. Couldn’t that dedication be a prolongation of love and the rest?” And that was how questions were taking shape that ended up in Dr. Falcão’s most intimate part with an affirmative answer. He still resisted. He was a friend of the family, he respected Dona Fernanda, he knew her to be virtuous, but—he went on thinking—it could well be that a hidden, discreet feeling—who knows, maybe even brought on by the other woman’s passion … There are those
temptations. The contagion of leprosy can corrupt the purest blood. A sad little germ can destroy the most robust organism.

Little by little, his faint wish for resistance was giving way to the notion of the possibility, the probability, and the certainty. In truth, he’d heard of certain works of charity by Dona Fernanda, but this case was new. That special dedication to a man who wasn’t a frequenter of the house or an old friend or a relative, a follower, a colleague of her husband, anything that would make him a participant in their domestic life by relationship, by blood, or by custom couldn’t be explained except for some secret reason. Love, most certainly. The curiosity of a virtuous woman, which can descend into sin and remorse. She probably withdrew in time. She was left with her morbid sympathy… And, therefore, who knows?

“A
nd, therefore, who knows?” Dr. Falcão repeated the next morning. Night hadn’t snuffed out the man’s mistrust. And, therefore, who knows? Yes, it might not be just morbid sympathy. Without knowing Shakespeare, he improved on Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your
philanthropy
” The finger of love was at work there. And he wasn’t mocking or tarnishing anything. I’ve already said that he was a skeptic, but since he was also discreet, he didn’t pass his conclusion on to anyone.

T
he return of Carlos Maria and his wife interrupted Dona Fernanda’s concern regarding Rubião. She went on board to greet them and took them to Tijuca, where an old friend of Carlos Maria’s family had rented and furnished a house on his instructions. Sofia didn’t go on board. She sent her coupé to wait for them on the Pharoux docks, but Dona Fernanda was already there with a caléche that took them along with herself and Palha. Sofia went to visit the new arrivals in the afternoon.

Dona Fernanda was bursting with contentment. The letters from Maria Benedita had said they were happy. She couldn’t read the confirmation of what had been written immediately in the eyes and manners of the couple, but they seemed satisfied. Maria Benedita couldn’t hold back her tears when she embraced her friend, nor could the latter hers, and they hugged each other like blood sisters. The next day Dona Fernanda asked Maria Benedita if she and her husband were happy, and, finding out that they were, she grasped her hands and stared at her for a long time, unable to find anything to say. All she could manage was to repeat the question.

“Are you two happy?”

“We are,” Maria Benedita answered.

“You don’t know how good your answer makes me feel. It’s not just that I would have felt remorse if you didn’t have the happiness I imagined I’d given you both, but also because it’s so nice to see other people happy. Does he love you as much as on the first day?”

“More, I think, because I adore him.”

Dona Fernanda didn’t understand those words.
More, I think, because I adore him!
In truth, the conclusion didn’t seem to match the premise, but it was a case of improving on Hamlet again: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your
dialectics.”
Maria Benedita began to tell her about the trip, unwinding her impressions and reminiscences. And since her husband came to join them a short while after, she had recourse to his memory to fill in the gaps.

“How was it, Carlos Maria?”

Carlos Maria remembered, explained, or rectified, but without interest, almost impatiently. He’d guessed that Maria Benedita had just confided her good fortune to the other woman, and he had trouble covering the unpleasant effect it had on him. Why say that she was happy with him since it couldn’t be any other way? And why divulge the caresses and loving words, the charity of a great and friendly god?

The return to Rio de Janeiro had been a concession on his part. Maria Benedita wanted to have her child here. Her husband gave in—with difficulty, but he gave in. Why with difficulty? It’s hard to explain, even harder to understand. Carlos Maria had personal and peculiar ideas regarding motherhood, hidden, not confided to anyone. He found nature to be shameless in making a public phenomenon of human gestation, in full view, growing into physical deformity, suggestive to the point of disrespect. That was what brought on his desire for solitude, mystery, and absence. They would live the final moments with pleasure inside a solitary house on the top of a hill, shut off from the world, and the woman would go down from there one day with her child in her arms and divinity in her eyes.

He made no such proposal to his wife. He would have had to argue, and he didn’t like arguing. He preferred giving in. Maria Benedita, naturally, had just the opposite feeling. She considered herself a divine and reserved temple in which a god was living, the child of another god. Her gestation went along filled with tedium, pain, discomfort, which she tried to hide from her husband as best she could. But all of it gave a greater value to the future little creature. She accepted her troubles with resignation—if not accepting them with joy—since it was a condition of the coming of the fruit. She fulfilled the duty of her species cordially. And she would repeat without words the reply of Mary of Nazareth: “I am the servant of the Lord; let His will be done in me.”

“W
hat’s the matter with you?” Maria Benedita asked as soon as they were alone.

“Me? Nothing. Why?”

“You seemed annoyed.”

“No, I wasn’t annoyed.”

“Yes you were,” she insisted.

Carlos Maria smiled without answering. Maria Benedita already knew that special smile of his, inexpressive, without tenderness or censure, superficial and wan. She didn’t persist in wanting to know. She bit her lip and withdrew.

In her room she thought for some time of nothing else but that wan, mute smile, the sign of some annoyance, the cause of which could only have been she. And she went over the whole conversation, all the gestures she’d made, and she found nothing that could explain the coldness or whatever it was with Carlos Maria. Maybe she’d been excessive in her talk. She was accustomed, if she was happy, to opening up her heart to friends and strangers. Carlos Maria disapproved of that generosity because it gave an air of great happiness to their moral and domestic status and because he considered that banal and inferior. Maria Benedita remembered that in Paris, with the Brazilian colony, she’d felt more than once that effect of her expansiveness and had repressed herself. But could Dona Fernanda be in the same situation? Wasn’t she the author of the happiness of them both? She rejected that hypothesis and tried to look for another. Not finding it, she returned to the first one, and, as always happened, she found her husband right. Really, no matter how intimate and pleasing it might be, she hadn’t ought to tell her good friend the minute details of their life, it was thoughtless of her …

Nausea came along to interrupt her at that point in her reflections. Nature was reminding her of a reason of state—the reason of the species—more immediate and superior to her husband’s annoyances. She gave in to necessity, but a few minutes later she was beside Carlos Maria, curving her right arm around his neck. He, seated, was reading an English magazine. He took the hand hanging over his chest and finished the page.

“Do you forgive me?” his wife asked when she saw him close the magazine. “From now on I’ll be less of a chatterbox.”

Carlos Maria took both her hands, smiling and answering yes with his head. It was as if he’d thrown a beam of light over her. The joy penetrated her soul. It might be said that the fetus itself reacted to the feeling and blessed its father.

“P
erfect! That’s the way I want to see you!” a voice shouted from the window side.

Maria Benedita moved rapidly away from her husband. The veranda, which was accessible from the living room by three doors, had one of them open. The voice had come from there.

Rubião’s head was peeping in and smiling. It was the first time they’d seen him. Carlos Maria, without getting up, looked at him, stern, waiting. And the head smiled with its thick mustache and pointed tips, looking from one to the other and repeating:

“Perfect! That’s the way I want to see you!”

Rubião came in, held out his hand to them, which they took without warmth, said some words of admiration and praise to Maria Benedita, she so elegant, he so handsome. He noted that they both bore the name Maria, a kind of predestination, and he ended up by giving them the news of the fall of the government.

“The cabinet fell?” Carlos Maria asked involuntarily.

“That’s all they’re talking about in the city. I’m going to sit down without asking permission since you haven’t offered me a chair yet,” he went on, sitting down, taking the cane he carried under his arm and placing his hands on it. “Well, it’s true, the government has resigned. I’m going to organize another. Palha will be in it, our Palha—your cousin Palha and you, too, sir, if it should so please you, will be a minister. I need a good cabinet, all strong friends, ready to lay down their lives for me. I’m going
to call on Morny, Pio, Camacho, Rouher, Major Siqueira. You remember the major, don’t you, ma’am? I think I’ll give him War. I don’t know any man more apt for military matters.”

Maria Benedita, annoyed and impatient, walked about the room waiting for her husband to tell her to do something. The latter told her to leave with his eyes. She didn’t wait for a second gesture, excused herself to their guest, and withdrew. Rubião, after she’d left, praised her again—a flower, he said, and corrected himself, laughing, “Two flowers, I think there are two flowers there. May the Lord bless them both!” Carlos Maria held out his hand as a sign of saying goodbye.

“My dear sir …”

“May I include you in the cabinet?” Rubião asked.

Not hearing a reply, he assumed the answer was yes, and he promised him a good portfolio. The major would go to War and Camacho to Justice. Did he know them by chance? “Two great men, Camacho even greater than the other.” And obeying Carlos Maria, who was heading toward the door, Rubião was leaving without being aware of it. But he wasn’t all that ready. On the veranda, before going down the steps, he mentioned several facts about the war. For example, he’d given Germany back to the Germans. It was a nice thing to do and good politics. He’d already given Venice to the Italians. He didn’t need any more territory. The Rhineland provinces, yes, but there was time to go after them …