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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Bento Santiago is madly in love with his neighbour, Capitú. He even breaks a promise his devout mother made to God - that he become a priest - in order to marry her. But, once wed, Bento becomes increasingly convinced that Capitú is having a torrid affair, that his son is not his own, and that his best friend has cuckolded him. What follows is a rich and sardonic narrative, as Bento attempts to discern his son's paternity. Are his suspicions actually based in reality or have his obsessive ruminations given way to deceptive illusions? Originally published in Brazil in 1900, Dom Casmurro is widely considered Machado de Assis's greatest work and a classic of Brazilian realist literature. It is a delightful and hilarious novel - told by an entertainingly unreliable narrator - about the powers of jealousy and the deceitful persuasiveness of a mind in the grip of paranoia. 'If Borges is the writer who made García Marquez possible then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado De Assis is the writer who made Borges possible.' - Salman Rushdie 'The greatest writer ever produced in Latin America.' - Susan Sontag 'Machado de Assis is a great ironist, a tragic comedian. In his books, in their most comic moments, he underlines the suffering by making us laugh.' - Philip Roth 'Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy or James.' - New York Times Book Review
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Dom Casmurro
MACHADO DE ASSIS
Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell
With a foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick
DAUNT BOOKS
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
DOM CASMURRO, a title of some peculiarity even for the Brazilian reader, is nevertheless a suitable entrance to the richly ironic landscape of the fiction of Machado de Assis. We learn in the early pages of the novel that the title is only a nickname bestowed by a disgruntled petitioner. Dom immediately suggests the royal family, since it is the designation of the emperor, Dom Pedro II. Casmurro is defined by the narrator as a ‘morose, tight-lipped man, withdrawn into himself’. The narrator is in fact named Bento Santiago, familiarly called ‘Bentinho’, and it is he who writes of his woeful life and love.
Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 and is one of those unaccountable talents which appear as they will, tossed up by the winds of chance, that benign, wayward blow that recklessly deposits the artists of the world on highways and byways. Yet Machado does not appear without preparation in the manner of a primitive genius, since he is very much a self-taught product of world culture, as his sly metaphors for the citizens of Rio and environs indicate on almost every page. His characters are provincial philosophers, relentlessly introspective, and likely to see themselves in a tormenting jealousy as Othello, or in madness to send forth a letter announcing, ‘I am St Augustine. I found it out day before yesterday … Everything in our lives coincides.’
Machado’s beginnings were unpromising in the extreme. His father was a mulatto born of freed slaves. Slavery in Brazil was not abolished until 1888, some fifty years after Machado’s birth. In his fiction there are references to people in the countryside having or selling their slaves, references that might appear very casual and offhand to a North American. Although slavery is slavery, the relations between blacks and whites were, according to the distinguished historian Gilberto Freyre and others, of a notable intimacy and relaxation – class rather than colour defining the social situation of mulattoes. Still, Machado’s father was a poor housepainter, as far as we know, and his mother was Spanish, from the Azores. Both parents died when the author was quite young, and he was early on his own. A wealthy and cultivated godmother took an interest in him and he perhaps thereby gained a knowledge of the ways of the world. French he is said to have learnt from a neighbourhood baker.
In addition to having a rather unprotected status in the hierarchical intellectual world of Portuguese colonialism, the future author had abominable health. He seems to have suffered from epilepsy, myopia and general bodily weakness. This storm of afflictions brings to mind the fate of the great Brazilian sculptor, Aleijadinho, born a century earlier, whose carvings of religious figures in the churches of Ouro Prêto are among the nation’s outstanding treasures. Aleijadinho, known as ‘the little cripple’, was maimed in hands and feet. In any case, the sickly Machado was enormously productive. He began his career in his teens with the publication of a poem. Subsequently, he worked as a journalist and wrote stories, plays and novels, the most important of which are Dom Casmurro, Epitaph of a Small Winner, and Philosopher or Dog? Along the way, he was appointed to a position in the Ministry of Agriculture, one of those sinecures, if that is what it was, offered to impecunious talents, like Hawthorne at his post in the Boston Customs House.
Bentinho Santiago in Dom Casmurro will write his life backward with the same reflective strategy used in Epitaph of a Small Winner. That novel begins: ‘I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing, a writer for whom the grave was really a new cradle.’ In Dom Casmurro the narrator says: ‘My purpose was to tie together the two ends of my life, to restore adolescence in age.’
Pursuing this curious form of reincarnation, the middle-aged Bentinho has built in the suburbs a house exactly like the one in which he grew up. There, under the spell of the eternal return, he is thrown back to his youth and to the story of his life, a story in which each twist and turn, each manoeuvre and countermanoeuvre will take on the importance of the decisions in one of Napoleon’s campaigns. Machado’s narrators are spoilt, well-to-do, provincial young men with a melancholy cast of mind. They will grow older and yet at the same time be consumed by memories. As their own biographers they must enter every door of past experience, say good morning, hold a girl’s hand, in the present tense, as it were. Theirs is the ultimate egotism, although they radiate a kind of innocence and are self-destructive rather than self-aggrandizing. With his magical perfection of tone and nuance, Machado leads the reader into an alliance of sympathy with his misbegotten heroes and their wistful preoccupations.
Dom Casmurro is Bentinho Santiago’s love story. The first child in the Santiago family had been born dead, and while awaiting the birth of our hero, his mother had promised God that if the new child were a male and lived, she would dedicate him to the Church. Perhaps she was hoping for a girl, our narrator muses, as he remembers the circumstances of his birth. Early on, the narrator is captivated by a neighbourhood girl, Capitolina, known by the diminutive Capitú. This childhood flirtation is brought to the mother’s attention by an interfering, but amusing, subsidiary character, a ‘dependent’ in the household – José Dias. He reports that Bentinho and Capitú are flirting, ‘getting into corners’, and this bodes ill for the future. Therefore, the family should be thinking of entering the boy into the seminary, according to the mother’s promise. The struggle to avoid the seminary takes up a good deal of the early pages of the novel, and in the negotiations and hesitations we get a wonderfully sly picture of the Brazilian ecclesiastical world which brings to mind the tactical worries of the curates and their ‘livings’ in nineteenth-century English fiction.
The true centre of the novel is Bentinho’s passion for Capitú. Passion is not quite the right word; perhaps obsession is more accurate. Machado is a master of psychological obsession, and Dom Casmurro has led some commentators to wonder if there might have been a Capitú in Machado’s life. No mésalliance has been discovered in his long, thirty-five years of marriage; indeed, the speculation is a tribute to the power of the author’s imaginative projection.
Machado’s heroes are ruminating bachelors by nature, inevitably pursuing the unattainable married woman or, as in the case of Capitú, transforming a consummated love into the unattainable by way of jealousy. Bentinho does for a time enter the seminary to prepare for the priesthood, and there he makes a new friend, Escobar, who will be his confidant and will be a fateful addition to the love of Bentinho and Capitú. We will have a trio, a triangle, the situation as dangerous as a roving disease that defines so much of world literature.
Both young men, ill-suited to becoming padres, will leave the seminary, and at twenty-four Bentinho is to become a Bachelor of Laws and Escobar will establish himself in commerce. Escobar marries and has a daughter, and with his hesitations finally resolved, Bentinho and Capitú marry, and all seems to go well. ‘Let us be happy once and for all, before the reader, half dead with waiting, picks himself up and goes for a walk. Let us get married. It was in 1865, an afternoon in March, and it happened to be raining.’
The young couple awaits a child. ‘It did not come. Capitú asked for it in her prayers. More than once I caught myself saying prayers and asking for it. It was no longer as it had been when I was a child; now I paid for it in advance, like house rent.’ Bentinho’s retrospective style, formed by a sardonic wit, puts him at a distance from the tradition of romantic suffering throughout his trials. True, he loves, he suffers, but the predominance of hesitation and the temptation to turn a phrase are those of the observer, the analyst. At last a son arrives and is given the name Ezekiel. Bentinho in his prayers had asked for a child, ‘however sad a little shaver he might be, sallow and thin, but a child, a child of my own body’. Ezekiel, however, is ‘a lusty boy, strong and beautiful’, and thus the plot takes a ferocious spin. Escobar dies in a boating accident, but not before Bentinho has begun to see a torturing resemblance between his son and his friend. Jealousy, suspicion, discovery, renunciation – themes from Othello, which Bentinho in his misery will attend at a local performance.
In the end, Capitú and Ezekiel are dispatched to Switzerland, where she dies. Ezekiel, grown, dies, too, on a trip to Egypt. All ‘gone to study the geology of holy ground’, as our narrator expresses the loss of family and friends. In a sense the frame of the novel is traditional; it includes the passage of time, the youth, middle age and death of all the characters, except, of course, the one who is writing in his reconstructed house, where after his parallel reconstruction of his marriage and disillusionment he plans to write a History of the Suburbs. This project has a typically Machado flavour to it, being a symptom of the strangely futile, meandering attraction to the abstract that idles away the lives of his Brazilian gentlemen.
Machado’s art is more English and European than what we think of as Latin American. The unexpected and radical modernism of his genius is brilliantly formulated by Susan Sontag in her introduction to Epitaph of a Small Winner. She points out the influence, backward, of Sterne and Joseph de Maistre, and the way, forward, in which this extraordinary innovator sends the reader’s mind to thoughts of Svevo, Italo Calvino and Beckett.
Dom Casmurro is a tragedy of betrayal, at least as most commentators view it. And yet a great deal of the psychological appeal of the plot lies in the ambiguity of the narrator’s compositional thicket of rhetorical flourishes that adorn, like little ribbons of wit, the account of appalling domestic suffering. The revelation scene – Othello’s handkerchief, as it were – has to do with the photograph of the dear friend, Escobar, that seems to rise from its frame to claim the sturdy, extroverted son, Ezekiel, to tear him away from the scrupulous, ironic, inward Bentinho. When Bentinho announces that Ezekiel is not his son, Capitú is indignant, as we would expect. Just then the boy comes into the room, and there, with the impugning photograph miserably at hand, the next line reads: ‘Then her confusion was pure confession.’
The true ground for the betrayal lies in the healthy charm and ‘normality’ of Capitú and Escobar, creatures of pleasure cast into a tempting triangle with Bentinho and the ironical sensibility that afflicts him. He can, after all is over, look back on his life as an opera. ‘I sang a tender duo, then a trio, then a quatuor.’ Indeed, he reflects, there are philosophers who are ‘nothing more than unemployed tenors.’
We note that Machado’s curious, rather claustrophobic constructions in no way seek to correspond to the vast, dominating landscape of Brazil, itself a beautiful, megalomaniacal natural phenomenon. Mato Grosso, Rio Grande do Sul or do Norte, Amazonia, flamboyant place names that they are, could scarcely be more remote from the parameters of Machado’s imagination. His world is interior, the interiors of Victorian houses and the interiors of the minds of his memory-bound, compulsive narrators. Rubiāo in Philosopher or Dog? is not brooding on the unexplored treasures in the ground beneath his feet or on the rubber in the forests of Manuas, but instead is sitting on an ottoman in a room filled with English prints, bronze statuettes of Mephistopheles and Faust. Artefacts of no local significance also decorate Bentinho’s suburban home. When the characters look dreamily at the waters of a beach, they do not contemplate the fabulous sands of Copacabana, lively as a tropical circus, but see instead some serene lake of the imagination. The turbulent street life of Rio is the occasion for a private encounter that will overwhelm the narrator with its oblique portentousness.
Nevertheless, there is a beguiling sort of national character attached to the everlasting interior monologues of the quaintly named Quincas Borba or Braz Cubas, with the tropical heat that is their brain, and the often expressed beauty of the ladies’ arms, like the plumage of the region’s spectacular birds. The grandiose in Brazil finds its counterpart in grandiloquent madness and in the disappointment of lives that cannot match the promise of the earth. ‘To the victor, the potatoes.’
We do not know that Borges read Machado, and yet it seems likely that the great Argentinian, who had read everything, must have found his way to his fellow creator born and living under the Southern Cross, ‘too high in the heavens to distinguish between men’s laughter and tears.’ What the two writers share is the wonderful musky perfume of the library that clings to their pages, wonderful because the resonant voice in simile and metaphor is enhanced here with the remembrance of culture as much as with the remembrance of an impediment to love. ‘Her reply was to force me to look down and see the ages continuing to go by, fast and turbulent; generation upon generation, some sad like the Hebrews of the captivity, and some merry like the libertines of Commodus’s reign, and all arriving punctually at the grave.’
It would seem that Machado’s attraction to digression, his rejection of the limits set by a strict adherence to point of view, his inspired wanderings from the scene at hand, arise from the bookishness of his imagination, from a mind in which a store of fantastical references is as relevant as what happened when the door opened. Of course, this delight in interruption requires a light touch and also makes a very special aesthetic demand: the diversions from the action must, above all, be interesting. In the sureness of pace, the ingratiating swerve, Machado is peerless. He may be read as pessimistic about the fate of mankind, but his iconoclasm, if it exists, is filled with dazzling humour and a rhythmical sense of the shape of page and paragraph; and thus he always stops just short of too much display.
Consider the brief excursion into the life of Manduca, a desperately poor young man dying of leprosy, but while alive obsessively occupied with the Crimean War and gasping with his last breath: ‘The Russians will not enter Constantinople!’ And at last to be buried: ‘Manduca himself, in order to enter the tomb, spent three years in dissolution, so certain is it that Nature, like History, does not proceed carelessly. Like Turkey his life resisted. If it finally yielded, it was because he lacked an alliance like the Anglo-French – for one cannot consider as such the simple accord between medicine and pharmacy.’ The union in this little passage of a kind of sweetness and courtesy in league with the droll reflection, at the cemetery no less, is typical of the sophistication and stunning pleasure of Machado’s prose.
Dom Casmurro is said to be a favourite of the Brazilian critics. With a writer like Machado there is a striking high plateau of achievement in each of the three acclaimed novels, and in a sense they form a unit. The mark of a radical and confident originality is so clear and glittering that each seems to flow to and from the other. Dom Casmurro, with its large cast of aunts and uncles, neighbours, and its tumble of incident and anecdote, all to be held in the circle of the love triangle, is to a degree the expected landscape of traditional fiction, but only to a degree. Bentinho, sitting in his suburban mansion, surrounded by the medallions of ‘Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Massinissa’, is a cuckold like no other. As he writes about himself: ‘A man consoles himself more or less for those he has lost, but I am myself missing, and this lack is essential. What is here may be likened to dye on hair or beard; it barely preserves the outer habit, as they say in autopsies; the inner structure will not take dye.’ As they say in autopsies – the irresistible parenthesis, the call of the classical comic spirit rather than the soul in its grave.
And naturally Bentinho is not missing. He is a full and unmistakably alive creation, although he is not recognizable in the sense of corresponding to those we have known. Such is the fascination of his being, the peculiarity of his placement between the recognizable Escobar and Capitú. Dom Casmurro is a triangle with two coherent lines, Capitú and Escobar, and one line at a crooked, wavering slant, Bentinho.
Capitú is one of Machado’s triumphs, perhaps a household name among cultivated Brazilian readers. She is charming, warm-hearted, beautiful, and not by nature duplicitous as much as mildly flirtatious. She is an active rather than a passive being and thus it is possible to feel more compassion for her in her banishment than for the wronged Bentinho, who, after all, will live and relive their life together, write it down, provide a commentary of unique asides and curious digressions, and exercise his rights to emphasis as the claim of total recall.
Withal there is a tenderness to the story, and each of the players in the triangle has a kind of purity – even Escobar, without whose masculine vital spirits we can surmise the child Ezekiel would never have existed. Bentinho is a loving father until the renunciation, which we note he accomplishes with fortitude, as if understanding that perhaps he was never designed to be a husband, to be called Papa, but was meant to be one of Machado’s interesting, angular bachelors, to be so in fact as well as in nature.
Dom Casmurro, written in Portuguese and published in 1900, is now almost a century old. With its modernist accent and tone, one could say, not insincerely, using the common phrase, that it might have been written yesterday. In fact, Machado died in 1908, and not in obscurity in his own country, where he received every honour and recognition due his genius. He lived an astonishing sixty-nine years, sickly artist that he was. The sedentary infirm, exercising only the two fingers that hold the pen, occasionally display a mighty grip on life. Dostoevsky, epileptic and tormented by poverty, managed to reach sixty years; Thomas Mann, having expected to die young, said that he felt almost ashamed to live eighty years, the venerable fourscore. We may think of it as the revenge of the imagination, pulsing along in spite of the body’s doleful messages.
To have Dom Casmurro brought into circulation is most certainly a happy event for new readers and a refreshment for those already acquainted with Machado de Assis, a prince of the literature of the New World, reigning in the spectacular tropical city of Rio de Janeiro. As Bentinho concludes: ‘Well, whatever may be the solution, one thing remains and it is the sum of sums, the rest of the residuum, to wit, that my first love and my greatest friend, both so loving me, both so loved, were destined to join together and to deceive me … May the earth rest lightly on them! Let us proceed to the History of the Suburbs.’
ELIZABETH HARDWICK, 1991
Dom Casmurro
1 ∙ THE TITLE
ONE NIGHT not long ago, as I was coming from the city to Engenho Novo,* on the Brazil Central, I ran into a young man from here in the neighbourhood, with whom I have a bowing acquaintance. He spoke, sat down beside me, talked of the moon and the government, ended by reading me some verses. The trip was short, and the verses may not have been entirely bad. It happened, however, that as I was tired, I closed my eyes three or four times – it was enough to make him stop reading and put the verses in his pocket.
‘Go on,’ I said, rousing myself.
‘I’ve finished,’ he muttered.
‘They are very fine.’
I saw him make a gesture to take them out of his pocket again, but it did not pass beyond a gesture. He was offended. The next day he said some hard things about me and gave me the nickname Dom Casmurro. The neighbours, who do not like my taciturn, recluse-like habits, took up the nickname: it stuck. This did not make me angry. I told the story to my friends in the city, and they, in fun, call me by it and write to me: ‘Dom Casmurro, I am coming to have dinner with you Sunday.’ ‘I am going to my old place at Petropolis, Dom Casmurro. See if you can’t tear yourself away from that cave in Engenho Novo and come spend a couple of weeks with me.’ ‘My dear Dom Casmurro, don’t imagine that you are going to escape my theatre party tomorrow night. You can stay overnight in the city. I promise you a box at the theatre, tea, and a bed. The only thing I don’t promise you is a girl.’
Don’t consult your dictionaries. Casmurro is not used here in the meaning they give for it, but in the sense in which the man in the street uses it, of a morose, tight-lipped man withdrawn within himself. The Dom was for irony: to impute to me aristocratic airs. All for dozing off! Well, I have found no better title for my narrative; if no better occurs, let it stand! My poet of the train will know that I do not bear him a grudge. And, with a little effort, since the title is his, he will be able to decide that the work is his. There are books which owe no more to their authors; some, not so much.
2 ∙ THE BOOK
NOW THAT I have explained the title, I will proceed to the book. First, however, let us go over the motives which placed a pen in my hand.
I live alone, with one servant. The house in which I live is mine. I had it built specially, to satisfy a desire that is so personal I am ashamed to print it – but here goes. One day, a number of years ago, I decided to reproduce in Engenho Novo, the house in which I grew up on old Rua de Matacavallos. It was to have the same appearance and plan as the other house, which had disappeared. Builder and decorator understood my instructions. It is the same tall structure with three windows across the front, veranda at the back, the same rooms upstairs and down. In the living room, the decoration of ceiling and walls is more or less identical: garlands of tiny flowers steadied, from space to space, by the beaks of stout birds. In the four corners of the ceiling, are the figures of the seasons; and in the centre of the walls, the medallions of Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Massinissa, with their names beneath … The reason for these personages eludes me. When we moved to the Matacavallos house, it was already decorated with them; they were from the previous decade. Perhaps it was the taste of that day to introduce a classical flavour and ancient figures into American paintings. The rest of the place is in the same mood. I have a small estate with flowers, vegetable garden, a casuarina tree, a wellpool and washing stones. I use old china and old furniture. And now, as formerly, there is the same contrast between the life within, which is tranquil, and that without, which is noisy and restless.
My purpose was to tie together the two ends of my life, to restore adolescence in old age. Well, sir, I did not succeed in putting back together what had been nor what I had been. If the face is the same, the expression is different. If it were only the others that were missing, no matter. A man consoles himself more or less for those he has lost, but I myself am missing, and this lack is essential. What is here may be likened to dye on hair and beard: it barely preserves the outer habit, as they say in autopsies; the inner structure will not take dye. A certificate stating that I am twenty years old might deceive a stranger, like any forged document, but not me. The friends I have left are of recent date; the old ones have all gone to study the geology of holy ground. As for my lady friends, some date back fifteen years, others less, and almost all believe in their own youthfulness. Two or three would have others believe in it, but the language they speak often obliges one to consult a dictionary, and such intercourse is wearisome.
Still, a different life does not mean a worse life; it is just not the same. In certain respects, that old life now appears stripped of much of the enchantment I found in it; but it has also lost many a spine that made it painful, and in my memory I keep some sweet and charming recollections. Now, I go out little; I seldom talk to people. Rare distractions. Most of my time is spent working in the garden and reading. I eat well and I do not sleep badly.
But, as everything wearies one, this monotony too finally exhausted me. I wanted change. What if I wrote a book? Jurisprudence, philosophy and politics suggested themselves; but they did not bring with them the necessary energy. Then I thought of writing a History of the Suburbs, something less dry than the memoirs of Padre Luiz Gonçalves dos Santos concerning our city; it would be a modest work, but it would demand documents and dates as preliminaries – a long, dull business. It was then that the busts painted on the walls spoke to me and said that since they had failed to bring back the days gone by, I should take my pen and tell over those times. Perhaps the act of narration would summon the illusion for me, and the shades would come treading lightly, as with the poet, not the one on the train but the one in Faust: Ah there, are you come again, restless shades?
I was so happy with this idea that the pen still trembles in my hand. Yes, Nero, Augustus, Massinissa, and thou, great Caesar, who incit’st me to compose my commentaries, I thank you for your advice, and I will put on paper the memories that come crowding. In this way I will live what I have lived, and I will strengthen my hand for some work of greater scope. Let us commence the evocation with a notable afternoon in November, which I never forgot. I had many others, better and worse, but that one never faded from my spirit – as you will discover by reading.
3 ∙ THE INFORMATION
I WAS about to go into the living room when I heard my name mentioned and hid behind the door. It was the house on Rua de Matacavallos, the month November, the year – the year is a trifle remote, but I am not one to change the dates of my life just to please those who do not like old stories – the year was 1857.
‘Dona Gloria, are you going ahead with your idea of putting our Bentinho in the seminary? It’s high time, and even now there may be a difficulty.’
‘What difficulty?’
‘A great difficulty.’
My mother wanted to know what it was. José Dias, after several instants of hesitation, came to see if there was anyone in the hall; he did not notice me, went back and, lowering his voice, said that the difficulty was in the house close by, the Padua family.
‘The Padua family?’
‘I’ve wanted to say this for some time, but I didn’t have the courage. It doesn’t look right to me for our Bentinho to be always getting into corners with the daughter of old Turtleback. And this is the difficulty, for if they should start making love, you’d have a struggle on your hands to separate them.’
‘Oh, no! Getting into corners?’
‘It’s a manner of speaking. Whispering in secret, always together. Bentinho almost never leaves that place. The girl is a scatterbrain. Her father pretends not to see; he’d just as soon things went so far that … I understand your gesture; you don’t believe that there are people so calculating, you think that everyone has a frank, open nature—’
‘But, Senhor José Dias, I’ve seen the youngsters playing, and I’ve never seen anything to make one mistrust – their age alone – Bentinho is barely fifteen. Capitú had her fourteenth birthday last week. They’re two babes. Don’t forget, they were brought up together, ever since the big flood ten years ago, when the Paduas lost so much; that was what started our intimacy. And am I to believe? … Brother Cosme, what do you think?’
Uncle Cosme answered with an ‘Aw!’ which, translated into the vulgar tongue, meant: ‘José Dias and his imagination! The youngsters amuse themselves! I amuse myself! Where is the backgammon board?’
‘Yes, I believe that you are mistaken, senhor.’
‘Perhaps so. God grant that you are right; but, believe me, I spoke only after much careful observation—’
‘In any case, the time is drawing near,’ interrupted my mother, ‘I must see about entering him in the seminary as soon as possible.’
‘Good, if you have not given up the idea of making him a priest, that’s the main thing. Bentinho is bound to comply with the wishes of his mother. And then too the Brazilian church has a noble destiny. Let us not forget that a bishop presided at the Constituent Assembly, and that Padre Feijó governed the empire—’
‘Governed like the fool he was!’ cut in Uncle Cosme, giving way to old political rancours.
‘Beg pardon, doctor, I am not defending anyone, I am merely citing cases. What I want to say is that the clergy still plays a big role in Brazil.’
‘What you want is a capot; get the backgammon board. As for the boy, if he has to be a padre, of course it’s better for him not to commence saying Mass behind doors. But look, Sister, is it really necessary to make a priest of him?’
‘It’s a promise; it must be kept.’
‘I know that you made a promise … but a promise like that … I don’t know … I believe that, when you come to think of it … What do you think, Cousin Justina?’
‘I?’
‘The truth is that each one knows best for himself,’ continued Uncle Cosme. ‘God is the one who knows what’s best for all. Still, such an old promise, made so many years ago … But what is this, Sister Gloria? You’re crying! Oh, now, is this anything to cry about?’
My mother blew her nose without answering. I believe that Cousin Justina rose and went to her. There followed a deep silence during which I was on fire to go into the room; but another, greater force, another emotion … I could not hear what Uncle Cosme was saying. Cousin Justina was comforting my mother: ‘Cousin Gloria! Cousin Gloria!’ José Dias was excusing himself: ‘If I had known, I would not have spoken, but I spoke because of my respect, and esteem, because of affection, to perform an unpleasant duty, a most unpleasant duty …’
4 ∙ A MOST UNPLEASANT DUTY
JOSÉ DIAS loved superlatives. It was a means of giving a monumental aspect to his ideas; when he had no ideas, it served to prolong his phrases. He went to fetch the backgammon board, which was in another part of the house. I flattened myself against the wall, and watched him walk past in his white starched trousers which strapped under the shoe, his cotton jacket and the patent cravat. He was one of the last to wear such trousers in Rio de Janeiro, and perhaps in the world. He wore his trousers short so that they were stretched tight. The black satin cravat, with the steel spring inside, immobilized his neck; it was the fashion. The simple jacket of printed cotton seemed like a full-dress coat on him. He was thin, drawn, and had a bald spot. He walked off with his usual slow step – not the dragging slowness of a lazy man, but a calculated, deliberate slowness, a complete syllogism, the major premise before the minor, the minor premise before the conclusion. A most unpleasant duty!
5 ∙ THE DEPENDENT
HE DID not always walk with that slow, stiff step. At times he gave way to excited gestures, was often swift and gay in his movements, as natural in this as in the other style. And he laughed loudly, if need be, a great hollow laugh, but infectious: to such a degree did cheeks, teeth, eyes, the whole face, the whole person, the whole world seem to laugh in him. In grave situations, most grave – gravissimo.
He had been our dependent for many years. My father was still on the old plantation at Itaguahy, and I had just been born. One day he appeared, representing himself as a homeopathic doctor; he carried a Manual and a case of medicines. There happened to be an epidemic of fevers at the time; José Dias cured the overseer and a female slave, but would not accept remuneration. My father proposed that he stay on, at the plantation, with a small salary. José Dias refused. He said it was his duty to bring health to the thatched hut of the poor.
‘Who’s keeping you from going anywhere? Go where you like, but live with us.’
‘I’ll come back in three months.’
