The Maias E-Book

José Maria Eça de Queiroz

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

'The greatest book by Portugal's greatest novelist.' Saramago

Das E-Book The Maias wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Eça de Queiroz

The Maias

Episodes from Romantic Life

Translated and with an introduction by Margaret Jull Costa

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited, 24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

Email: [email protected]

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 903517 53 6

ISBN e-book 978 1 907650 33 8

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Publishing History

First published in Portugal in 1888

First published by Dedalus in 2007

First e-book edition 2011

Translation, introduction and notes © Margaret Jull Costa 2007

The right of Margaret Jull Costa to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988

Printed in Finland by WS.Bookwell

Typeset by Refine Catch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

Portuguese Literature from Dedalus

Dedalus, as part of its Europe 1992–2012 programme, with the assistance of The Portuguese Book Institute, The Camões Institute in Lisbon and The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, has embarked on a series of new translations by Margaret Jull Costa of some of the major classics of Portuguese Literature.

Titles so far published:

Cousin Bazilio – Eça de Queiroz

The Crime of Father Amaro – Eça de Queiroz

The Maias – Eça de Queiroz

The Mandarin (and other stories) – Eça de Queiroz

The Relic – Eça de Queiroz

The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers – Eça de Queiroz

Lúcio’s Confession – Mário de Sá-Carneiro

The Great Shadow (and other stories) – Mário de Sá-Carneiro

The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy – editors Eugénio Lisboa and Helder Macedo

Forthcoming titles include:

The City and the Mountains – Eça de Queiroz

The Illustrious House of Ramires – Eça de Queiroz

THE TRANSLATOR

Margaret Jull Costa has translated many Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, amongst them Lídia Jorge, José Saramago, Carmen Martín Gaite, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and Luis Fernando Verissimo. Her most recent prize was the 2006 Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The translator would like, as always, to thank Maria Manuel Lisboa and Ben Sherriff for all their help, advice and support.

INTRODUCTION

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz was born on 25th November 1845 in the small town of Póvoa de Varzim in the north of Portugal. His mother was nineteen and unmarried. Only the name of his father – a magistrate – appears on the birth certificate. Following the birth, his mother returned immediately to her respectable family in Viana do Castelo, and Eça was left with his wetnurse, who looked after him for six years until her death. Although his parents married later – when Eça was four – and had six more children, Eça did not live with them until he was twenty-one, living instead either with his grandparents or at boarding school in Oporto, where he spent the holidays with an aunt. His father only officially acknowledged Eça as his son when the latter was forty. He did, however, pay for his son’s studies at boarding school and at Coimbra University, where Eça studied Law, and was always supportive of his writing ambitions. After working as the editor and sole contributor on a provincial newspaper in Évora, Eça made a trip to the Middle East. Then, in order to launch himself on a diplomatic career, he worked for six months in Leiria as a municipal administrator, before being appointed consul in Havana (1872–74), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1874–79) and Bristol (1879–88). In 1886, he married Emília de Castro with whom he had four children. His last consular posting was to Paris, where he served until his death in 1900.

He began writing stories and essays as a young man and became involved with a group of intellectuals known as the Generation of ’70, who were committed to reforms in society and in the arts. He published four novels and one novella during his lifetime: The Crime of Father Amaro (3 versions: 1875, 1876, 1880), Cousin Bazilio (1878), The Mandarin (1880), The Relic (1887) and The Maias (1888). His other novels were published posthumously: The City and the Mountains, The Illustrious House of Ramires, To the Capital, Alves & Co., The Letters of Fradique Mendes, The Count of Abranhos and The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers.

The Maias was written over a period of eight years and started out as part of a projected series of novels, entitled Scenes from Portuguese Life. The Maias was originally to be published as a serial in the newspaper Diário Portugal, but when the novel continued to expand into something much larger, Eça wrote his delightful novella The Mandarin to be serialised in its place, while The Maias continued to grow. What the novel grew into was not so much an historical panorama of nineteenth- century Portugal – although it does span nearly seventy years from 1820 to 1887 – as a portrait of a society in unstoppable moral decline. The Maia family, ‘an old and never very numerous Beira family’, now consists of Afonso and his grandson Carlos. Afonso represents the old Portugal of old- fashioned, but liberal values; Carlos is apparently the new Portugal – well-educated, socially-minded and full of modern ideas. However, Carlos, for all his intelligence and good intentions, is incapable of carrying through his medical and scientific ambitions, and is really much more interested in the arts, in getting the décor of his consulting rooms just right, in having fine horses and fine carriages, and in turning a fine phrase. He is morally and emotionally adrift, and, significantly, the one irresistible impulse in his life carries him into a passionate, but doomed relationship and, thereafter, into a series of sterile, transient affairs. Like the attempt to modernise Lisbon – the construction of the grand new Avenida which Carlos visits on his brief return to Portugal – everything he does ‘swiftly runs out of breath and grinds to an almost immediate halt among piles of gravel’.

Despite the strict upbringing given him by his grandfather, what predominates ultimately in Carlos’ character is the rather flabby romanticism of his father, Pedro da Maia. Indeed, his great friend Ega, says in the final scene: ‘And what are we, if not romantics? … What have we been since we were at school, since we were sitting our Latin exam? Romantics, which is to say, inferior individuals ruled in life by feelings and not by reason.’ Except that when the truth is revealed about Maria Eduarda, Carlos does not, like his father, take the classic Romantic step of committing suicide, he goes off travelling and ends up living a life of luxurious and vapid idleness in Paris.

In tone and structure, the novel is as ambivalent as its protagonist Carlos. The narrative voice is clear-sighted, sceptical, and ironic, but its plot turns on those Romantic stratagems: fate, coincidence, dire prophesies fulfilled and history tragically repeating itself. During the course of the novel there are occasional robust and often comical discussions about the respective merits of Naturalism and Romanticism, with the narrator apparently resisting total support for either side. In the novel, however, the author has brought both schools of thought seamlessly together, blending, as his literary hero Flaubert did, a naturalist surface with a symbolic subtext.

Things, for example, happen in twos, events mirror or foreshadow each other: Carlos’ first dazzled glimpse of Maria Eduarda is a more romantic version of his father Pedro’s first sighting of Maria Monforte; as Ega’s liaison with the Jewish banker’s wife descends into farce, Carlos embarks upon his grotesque affair with the Countess de Gouvarinho; Carlos beats up Eusèbiozinho twice, once in childhood and again as an adult; Carlos never finishes his book on medicine, ancient and modern, and Ega’s Memoirs of an Atom remains a much- talked-about idea; Miss Sara has sex on the lawn with a farm labourer as Carlos is on his way to a nocturnal tryst with Maria Eduarda. And while other characters tend to form into pairs – the friends, Carlos and Ega; the married mistresses, the Countess and Raquel; the amoral self-seekers, Dâmaso and Castro Gomes; the pompous windbags, the Count de Gouvarinho and Alencar – Afonso and Maria Eduarda remain singular beings, and it is noteworthy that they alone are spared Eça’s scathing humour. Having said that, the friendship between Carlos and Ega seems utterly genuine, and, doubtless with deliberate irony, in a novel subtitled ‘Episodes from romantic life’, when all attempts at romance fail, it is the friendship between these two men that survives the test of time.

There are also curious leitmotivs in the book, for example, the cheese pastries that Cruges forgets to buy in Sintra. Carlos goes to Sintra in the belief that there he will find the woman whom he has seen twice, but never met, and with whom he has nonetheless fallen passionately in love. His friend, Cruges, has been charged by his mother not to return without bringing back this unique Sintra speciality, queijadas (tartlets filled with a mixture of sugar, egg, cinnamon and a fresh cheese similar to ricotta). Both men, therefore, are on a mission, and the literary function of Cruges’ mission is to act as a bathetic counterpart to Carlos’. They drive back at the end of the day with Carlos having failed to encounter his true love and Cruges having forgotten to buy the cakes. Both woman and cakes are delectable, sought-after consumables, and, as we learn later, both can be bought. These cakes, having once been associated with Maria Eduarda – the woman being pursued – recur later in the novel, either as a gift that has, again, been forgotten or as a gift that comes to nothing. When Ega, Carlos’ best friend, first meets Maria Eduarda at Carlos’ house, he brings with him a packet of queijadas. ‘… the brown paper parcel, only loosely tied together, came undone, and a fresh supply of exquisite Sintra cheese pastries tumbled out onto the floral rug and promptly crumbled into nothing.’ The seemingly unique relationship between Maria Eduarda and Carlos is as fragile as those cheese pastries and will, quite soon, also ‘crumble into nothing’.

Eça was a self-declared Naturalist writer, and yet, as is clear from this and other works, was deeply drawn to Romanticism and to fantasy. It is perhaps no coincidence that, in the midst of writing The Maias, which was intended to be his great Naturalist masterpiece, he escaped into the wonderful blend of social satire, travelogue and fantasy which is The Mandarin.

It is this beguiling blend of two literary schools that makes his novels seem so fresh and modern, that and his taste for the absurd, for satire and for farce. In the case of The Maias, it is, I think, the interweaving of realism and romanticism, bathos and genuine pathos, dialogues and lush descriptions, along with truly memorable characters, that gives the novel its monumental feel. When, after a ten year absence, Carlos and Ega revisit Ramalhete, Carlos remarks: ‘It’s odd, you know, I only spent two years in this house, and yet it seems to contain my whole life!’ At the end of its 700 or so pages, the novel leaves the reader with a similar sense of having lived a whole life and been privy to a whole, vanished world.

I

The house in Lisbon to which the Maias moved in the autumn of 1875 was known in Rua de São Francisco de Paula, and in the surrounding area of Janelas Verdes, as the Casa do Ramalhete, the House of the Bouquet of Flowers, or, more simply, as Ramalhete. Despite that fresh green name worthy of some rural retreat, Ramalhete was a large stern house of sober walls, with a line of narrow wrought-iron balconies on the first floor, and, above that, a row of timid little windows sheltering under the eaves, a house which, as befitted a building dating from the reign of Queen Maria I, had the gloomy appearance of an ecclesiastical residence, and indeed, to complete its resemblance to a Jesuit college, it needed only a bell and a cross. The name, Ramalhete, doubtless came from the square panel of decorative tiles placed in the spot intended for a coat of arms that had never materialised, and which depicted a large bunch of sunflowers tied with a ribbon on which one could still just make out the letters and numbers of a date.

For long years, Ramalhete had remained empty; cobwebs appeared on the grilles on the ground-floor windows, and the house slowly took on the grim look of a ruin. In 1858, the papel nuncio, Monsignor Buccarini, had visited it with a view to establishing his residence there, seduced by the building’s clerical gravity and by the sleepy peace of the neighbourhood: he liked the interior of the house too, with its palatial rooms and coffered ceilings, the walls covered in frescos on which the roses on the garlands and on the cheeks of the little cupids were already fading. However, the Monsignor, accustomed to life as a rich Roman prelate, also wanted a house with a fine garden full of groves of trees and fountains, and Ramalhete, beyond its tiled terrace, boasted only a poor uncultivated plot, abandoned to the weeds, with a cypress, a cedar, a dried-up waterfall, a choked pond, and, in one corner, a marble statue (which the Monsignor immediately identified as Aphrodite) growing ever blacker beneath the encroaching dankness of untamed vegetation. Apart from that, the rent proposed by old Vilaça, the Maia family’s administrator, seemed to the Monsignor so extortionate that he asked, with a smile, if Vilaça thought the Church was still living in the age of Pope Leo X. Vilaça retorted that the Portuguese nobility were likewise no longer living in the age of King João V. And so Ramalhete remained empty.

This useless old pile (as Vilaça Junior called it, for he had taken over as the Maias’ administrator following the death of his father) only became of use again towards the end of 1870, as a storeroom for the furniture and crockery from the rather more historic family mansion in Benfica, which, after being on the market for some years, had finally been bought by a Brazilian comendador. This happened to coincide with the sale of Tojeira, another property belonging to the Maia family, a fact that aroused the curiosity of the few people in Lisbon who remembered the Maias and knew that, for the past twenty years or so, they had been living quietly on their estate, the Quinta de Santa Olávia, on the banks of the River Douro. These few people asked Vilaça if the Maia family were in financial difficulties.

‘Oh, they still have a crust of bread to eat,’ answered Vilaça, smiling, ‘and butter to spread on it too.’

The Maias were an old and never very numerous Beira family, with few relatives and no collateral branches, in fact, they were now down to the last two males, the master of the house, Afonso da Maia, who was an old man, almost a patriarch, older than the century, and his grandson, Carlos, who was studying medicine at Coimbra University. When Afonso had moved to Santa Olávia, the income from the estate was already in excess of fifty thousand cruzados, and money had subsequently accrued from savings made during those twenty years of simple country living; there had also been an inheritance from their last surviving relative, Sebastião da Maia, who since 1830 had lived alone in Naples, where he had devoted himself to numismatics: so Vilaça, the administrator, had every reason to smile confidently when he spoke of the Maias and their crust of bread.

Tojeira had been sold on Vilaça’s advice, but he had never approved of Afonso’s decision to get rid of the house in Benfica merely because its walls had seen so many domestic misfortunes. As Vilaça said, the same thing happened to all walls. Since Ramalhete was now uninhabitable, the Maias had no house in Lisbon, and while Afonso, in his old age, might love the peace and quiet of Santa Olávia, his grandson, a young man with expensive tastes, who spent his holidays in Paris or in London, would not want to bury himself among the steep hills of the Douro valley once he had graduated. And so it was that, some months before Carlos was due to leave Coimbra, Afonso astonished Vilaça by announcing that he had decided to come and live in Ramalhete! Vilaça immediately drew up a report enumerating the house’s many inconveniences, the greatest of which was the vast amount of renovation work that this would involve and the equally vast expense; then, of course, there was the lack of a proper garden, which would, naturally, be deeply felt by anyone forced to abandon Santa Olávia’s leafy groves; and, finally, there was the legend, according to which the walls of Ramalhete had always proved fatal to the Maias, although, as he himself admitted sagely, he felt somewhat ashamed even to mention such superstitious nonsense in the age of Voltaire, Guizot and other liberal-minded philosophers.

Highly amused by this last remark, Afonso replied that, while the reasons Vilaça gave were all excellent, he nevertheless preferred to live in a house that had a long family connection, and if renovation work was required, then so be it, there was money enough to pay for it; and the best way to deal with legends and omens was to fling wide the windows and let in the sun.

Afonso had his way, and since it had so far been a dry winter, work began at once, under the direction of a certain Esteves, who was an architect, a politician and friend of Vilaça’s. Esteves enthused Vilaça with his plan for a magnificent staircase flanked by two figures symbolising Portugal’s conquests in Guinea and in India. Indeed, he was in the throes of designing a ceramic fountain for the dining room when Carlos arrived unexpectedly in Lisbon accompanied by an architect-cum-decorator from London. After only the briefest of discussions regarding décor and fabric colours, Carlos handed over the four walls of Ramalhete to this Londoner and left him to apply his good taste to creating an interior that would combine comfort with intelligent, sober luxury.

Vilaça bitterly resented this blatant disregard for a Portuguese artist like Esteves, and Esteves went bleating to his political friends that Portugal was a lost cause. Afonso, too, regretted Esteves’ dismissal, and even demanded that he should be given the commission to build the new coach- houses. The ‘artist’ was just about to accept, when he was appointed to the post of civil governor.

After a year, during which Carlos made frequent visits to Lisbon to collaborate on the work and ‘to add a few aesthetic touches’, all that remained of the old Ramalhete was the grim façade, which, since it constituted the house’s physiognomy, Afonso had chosen to retain. And Vilaça was the first to declare that ‘Jones Bule’ (as he called the Englishman), without being too extravagant, had made of Ramalhete ‘a veritable museum’, even incorporating some of the antiques from the mansion in Benfica.

The biggest surprise was the courtyard: once a bare and gloomy place paved with flagstones, now it positively glowed, with its white and red marble tiles, decorative plants, Quimper pots, and two long, carved wooden benches – as solemn as the stalls from a cathedral choir – which Carlos had brought back with him from Spain. Upstairs, in the anteroom, decked out like a shop selling fabrics from the Orient, any sound of footsteps was instantly muffled; it was furnished with divans draped in Persian rugs and with large copper-toned Moorish plates, providing a harmoniously sombre backdrop to the immaculate marble white of a statue – the figure of a young girl, shivering with cold and laughing as she dipped one dainty toe in the water. From here, one passed to a broad corridor, full of the finest pieces from the house in Benfica – Gothic chests, large Indian vases, and ancient devotional paintings. Ramalhete’s noblest rooms opened onto this gallery. In the rarely used reception room, decorated entirely in velvet brocades the colour of autumn moss, there was a fine Constable portrait of Afonso’s mother-in-law, the Countess de Runa, wearing a plumed tricorn hat and the scarlet riding habit of an English huntswoman, and set against a background of misty countryside. A smaller room to the side, intended as a music room, had an eighteenth-century air about it, with its ornate gilded furniture and gleaming sprigged silks; two faded Gobelin tapestries, in various shades of grey, covered the walls with shepherds and woods.

Opposite was the billiard room, lined with a new kind of leather brought especially from England by Jones Bule, on which silvery storks fluttered, caught in a tangle of bottle- green branches. Next door was the fumoir, the most comfortable room in the house, where the ottomans were as large and soft as beds, and the warm, somewhat sombre embrace of the scarlet and black upholstery was offset by the singing colours of the old Dutch faience-ware.

At the end of the corridor lay Afonso’s study, furnished like a prelate’s chamber in red damasks. Everything in the room – the solid rosewood desk, the low shelves made from carved oak, the sober opulence of the bindings on the books – combined to create an austere air of studious peace, reinforced by a painting attributed to Rubens, a family heirloom, of Christ on the cross, his bare athletic body set against a turbulent fiery sunset. Beside the fire, Carlos had created a little nook for his grandfather with a gold-embroidered Japanese screen, a white bearskin and a venerable old armchair, whose faded silk upholstery still bore the Maia coat of arms.

Afonso had his private rooms on the second floor, off a corridor lined with various family portraits. Carlos, for his part, had chosen to have his quarters in one corner of the house, and these, with their own private entrance and windows overlooking the garden, comprised three interconnecting rooms with the same carpet running through them all; the cushioned chairs and sofas, the silk-lined walls, caused Vilaça to remark that they were more like a dancer’s boudoir than a doctor’s private apartments!

Once work on the house was completed, it remained empty while Carlos, now a graduate, made a long tour of Europe, and it was only on the eve of his return, in that lovely autumn of 1875, that Afonso finally resolved to leave Santa Olávia and move into Ramalhete. He had not seen Lisbon for twenty-five years and, after only a few brief days, he confessed to Vilaça that he was already longing for the shade of Santa Olávia. But what else could he do? He did not want to live far from his grandson, and Carlos, who fully intended taking up an active career in medicine, had to live in Lisbon. Besides, he did not dislike Ramalhete, even though Carlos, with his enthusiasm for the lavish décor of colder climes, had perhaps overdone the velvet, the tapestries and the heavy door curtains. He liked the neighbourhood too, liked its air of sweet suburban tranquillity drowsing in the sun. He even liked the little garden. Obviously, it could not compare with the garden at Santa Olávia, but there was, nonetheless, something very pleasant about it, with the sunflowers standing to attention at the bottom of the terrace steps, the cypress and the cedar tree growing old together like two sad friends; and the figure of Aphrodite, who, having recovered the pale tones proper to a garden statue, could easily have come straight from Versailles and the height of the Grand Siècle. And now that there was water in abundance, the little waterfall was a delight, in its niche of shells, with its three large boulders arranged to form a bucolic crag, bringing a touch of melancholy to the far end of the otherwise sunny garden, and creating a sound like that of a weeping domestic naiad, her tears falling drop by drop into the marble basin.

What saddened Afonso at first was the view from the terrace, which would once, no doubt, have been of the sea. The houses built on every side in the last few years had all but blocked that splendid vista. A narrow strip of water and hill between two five-storey buildings, separated by a street, was now the only view to be had from Ramalhete. In the end, though, Afonso managed to find in that, too, a secret charm. It was like a seascape framed in white masonry, suspended from the blue sky opposite the terrace, revealing, in all the infinite varieties of colour and light, fleeting scenes of peaceful river life: the sail of a boat from Trafaria luffing blithely by; a galley in full sail taking advantage of the breeze, serene against the red evening sky; the melancholy of a great steamship setting off, battened down and ready to face the waves, glimpsed one moment and gone the next, as if swallowed by the uncertain sea; or even, for days at a time, in the golden dust of silent noontides, the black hulk of an English battleship. And always, in the distance, there was that fragment of dark green hillside, with a windmill on top, and two white houses at the water’s edge, always so expressive – the light glittering and glancing from windows ablaze with sun, or taking on at day’s end a pensive air, clothed in a tender sunset pink, almost like the blush on a human face, or again, on rainy days, shivering and sad, so alone, so white, as if naked and at the mercy of the wild weather.

Three sets of French windows connected the terrace and the study, and Afonso quickly became accustomed to spending his days there, in that lovely prelate’s chamber, in the cosy fireside nook so lovingly prepared for him by his grandson. Afonso’s long residence in England had given him a fondness for quiet hours spent by the hearth. In Santa Olávia, the fires were lit until April, after which they were adorned instead with armfuls of flowers, like a domestic altar; and it was there, in the perfumed freshness, that he still most enjoyed to sit, smoking his pipe and reading Tacitus or his beloved Rabelais.

Afonso, however, was far from being, as he put it, an old sluggard. Winter and summer, he was up at daybreak and out in the garden, having first said his ‘morning prayers’, which took the form of a bracing cold water bath. He had always had a superstitious love of water and used to say that there was nothing better for a man than the taste of water, the sound of water and the sight of water. What bound him most to Santa Olávia was its abundance of fresh water, in the form of springs, fountains and the mirror-still surfaces of pools or the cool murmur of streams. Indeed, he attributed to the living vigour of water the fact that he had survived from the beginning of the century with no aches or pains or illnesses, thus keeping up the family’s long tradition of rude health – proof against sorrows and the passing years, which had as little effect on him as the passing years and storms had on his oak trees in Santa Olávia.

Afonso was quite short and stocky, with strong square shoulders; and, with his broad face, aquiline nose and ruddy complexion, his close-cropped white hair and long snow- white beard, he had the look, as Carlos put it, of a courageous man from an age of heroes, a Dom Duarte de Meneses perhaps or an Afonso de Albuquerque. This always made the old man smile, and he would jokingly remind his grandson how deceptive appearances can be!

No, he was no Meneses or Albuquerque, he was merely a good-natured old man who loved his books, the comfort of his armchair, and a game of whist by the fireside. He himself used to say that he was basically selfish, but, in truth, he had never been so profoundly generous as he was in his old age. Part of his income slipped easily through his fingers in acts of tender charity. His heart was touched more than ever by the poor and the weak. In Santa Olávia, the children would run out to him from their doorways, sensing that he was a kind and patient man. Everything that lived seemed deserving of his love; he was the sort who would never stamp on an ant’s nest and who took pity on a thirsty plant.

Vilaça was always reminded of descriptions of the patriarchs when he saw Afonso sitting by the fireside, serene and contented, in his worn velvet jacket, with a book in his hand and his old cat curled up at his feet. This vast, plump angora cat, white with ginger markings, had been Afonso’s faithful companion ever since the death of Tobias, his superb St Bernard. Born in Santa Olávia, the cat had been given the name of Bonifácio; then, when he reached the age of love and hunting, he had received the more gallant name of Dom Bonifácio de Calatrava; and now, sleepy and obese, and having clearly achieved the state of repose attained by all ecclesiastical dignitaries, he was known to all as the Reverend Boniface.

Afonso’s life, however, had not always flowed by with the easy, clear tranquillity of a lovely summer river. This same old man, whose eyes filled with tenderness whenever he looked at his roses and who sat by his fireside contentedly re-reading Guizot, had, at least in his father’s view, once been the fiercest Jacobin in all Portugal! And yet the poor lad’s revolutionary fervour had consisted of nothing more than reading Rousseau, Volney, Helvétius and the Encyclopédie, setting off a few fireworks in honour of the Constitution, going around wearing a ‘liberal’ hat and a blue cravat, and, in masonic lodges, reciting abominable odes addressed to the Supreme Architect of the Universe. This, however, was quite enough to upset his father. Caetano da Maia was a faithful Portuguese gentleman of the old school, who would cross himself at the mere mention of Robespierre’s name, and who, in his devout, feeble brand of aristocratic apathy, harboured only one passionate emotion – a horror and hatred of the Jacobins, to whom he attributed all ills – those of his country as well as his own, from the loss of the colonies to his attacks of gout. In order to root out the Jacobin from Portugal, he had given his heart to that strong Messiah and providential restorer of the nation, the Infante Dom Miguel. And having a Jacobin son seemed to him a trial comparable only to Job’s!

At first, in the hope that the boy would mend his ways, he contented himself with shooting him severe glances and addressing him sarcastically as ‘Citizen’! However, when he learned that his son and heir had been part of a rabble who, during a night of civic celebrations and street illuminations, had thrown stones at the darkened windows of the Austrian envoy and emissary of the Holy Alliance, he decided, there and then, that his son was a new Marat and unleashed upon him the full force of his rage. A particularly virulent attack of gout kept him confined to his armchair at the time and thus prevented him from soundly beating the ‘mason’ with his Indian walking stick, as any good Portuguese father would, and so he decided, instead, to drive him from his house, without an allowance and without his blessing, disowned, as if he were a bastard son, for how could a freemason possibly be of his blood!

His wife’s tears caused him to relent, as did the arguments of his wife’s sister-in-law, who lived with them in Benfica, a highly educated Irishwoman and a respected tutelary Minerva, who had taught the boy English and adored him as if he were still a little baby. Caetano da Maia confined himself to exiling his son to Santa Olávia, but he did not cease to weep upon the bosom of the priests who came to Benfica and to bemoan the misfortune that had overwhelmed the household. And those saintly men consoled him, telling him that God, the old God, who had seen Dom Afonso Henriques defeat the Moors at Ourique, would never allow a Maia to make a pact with Beelzebub and with the Revolution! And if God the Father did not oblige, Our Lady of Solitude, the household’s protecting saint and the boy’s sponsor, could always be relied upon to work the necessary miracle.

And the miracle duly occurred. Some months later, the Jacobin, the Marat, returned from Santa Olávia, somewhat contrite and, more than anything, bored to death by the remoteness of the place, where taking tea with Brigadier Sena was rivalled only in glumness and tedium by having to say the rosary with his cousins, the Miss Cunhas. He came to his father to ask for his blessing and a few thousand cruzados in order to go to England, that land of bright meadows and golden tresses, of which his Aunt Fanny had so often spoken. His father kissed him tearfully and gave his fervent consent, seeing in all this the evident glorious intercession of Our Lady of Solitude! Even his confessor, Father Jerónimo da Conceição, declared this miracle to be in no way inferior to the vision of Our Lady at Carnaxide.

Afonso set off. It was springtime, and he found England – all in green, with its lavish parks and gardens, its many comforts, the intelligent harmony of its noble customs, its strong, serious-minded people – utterly enchanting. He soon forgot about his hatred of the grumpy priests of the Congregation and about the ardent hours spent in the Café dos Remolares reciting Mirabeau, as well as the republic he had hoped to found on classical Voltairean lines, with a triumvirate of Scipios and festivals held in celebration of the Supreme Being. During the 1824 uprising in Portugal, Afonso was to be found at the Epsom races, riding in a gig, wearing a large false nose and uttering fearsome war whoops, utterly indifferent to the fate of his brother masons, who were, at that very moment, being driven along the alleyways of the Bairro Alto in Lisbon by the Infante Dom Miguel mounted on his fine Alter do Chão stallion.

The sudden death of Afonso’s father, however, obliged him to return to Lisbon, where he met the Count de Runa’s daughter, Dona Maria Eduarda Runa, a lovely, dark-haired girl, albeit rather sickly and delicate. As soon as the period of mourning for his father was over, he married her. They had one son and wanted more; Afonso, full of the fine ideas of a young patriarch, immediately set about improving the house at Benfica, planting trees and preparing shelter and shade for the beloved children who would bring joy to his old age.

Not that he forgot England. Indeed, England was made all the more alluring by Dom Miguel’s Lisbon, which seemed to him as unruly as Tunis under Barbary rule: with its crude apostolic conspiracy of friars and coachmen filling taverns and chapels alike; with its fierce, grubby, fanatical populace, who reeled from the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament to the bull ring, clamouring tumultuously for that prince who so perfectly embodied their own vices and passions.

This spectacle enraged Afonso da Maia, and often, on quiet evenings, among friends, with his small son on his knee, he would give voice to the indignation he felt in his honest soul. He no longer expected, as he had when he was a young man, a Lisbon peopled by such heroes as Cato and Mucius Scaevola. He even accepted the aristocracy’s right to maintain its historic privileges, but what he wanted was a worthy intelligent aristocracy, like the Tory aristocracy (which, in his love for England, he greatly idealised), one that would set the moral tone in everything, shaping customs and inspiring literature, living elegantly and speaking well, an exemplar of high ideals and a mirror of patrician manners. What he could not bear was the bestial, sordid world of the Palace of Queluz. However, no sooner had these words been spoken than they flew straight to Queluz. And when the Cortes reassembled, the police raided the Maia house at Benfica ‘looking for documents and hidden weapons’.

Afonso da Maia, with his son in his arms and his trembling wife by his side, watched silently and impassively as rifle butts smashed open drawers and the grimy hands of the bailiff rummaged in the mattress on his bed. The judge found nothing, and, in the pantry, even accepted the offer of a glass of wine and confessed to the administrator that ‘these were harsh times’. From that morning on, the windows of the house remained closed; the main door no longer opened for Dona Maria Eduarda’s carriage; and, a few weeks later, with his wife and child, Afonso da Maia left for England and exile.

There, preparing himself for a long stay, he settled, in some style, near Richmond, on the outskirts of London, in a house set in parkland, in the serene and gentle Surrey countryside.

Thanks to the influence of the Count de Runa – a former favourite of Queen Carlota Joaquina and now an uncompromising minister under Dom Miguel – his goods had not been confiscated, and Afonso da Maia was able to live very comfortably indeed.

At first, other liberal emigrés, Palmela and those who sailed from La Coruña in the English ship, the Belfast, came to bother and badger him. His upright soul was quick to protest at the separation of castes and hierarchies, which was maintained even on foreign soil among those who had been defeated over the same ideal – the noblemen and high court judges living a life of luxury in London, and the ordinary people and soldiers, after all that they had suffered in Galicia, succumbing to the effects of hunger, vermin and fever in the hovels of Plymouth. He immediately found himself in conflict with the liberal leaders; he was accused of being a Jacobin and a democrat; and it was at this point that he lost faith in liberalism. He isolated himself then, but still did not close his purse, from which coins continued to flow in their fifties and hundreds. Only when the first expedition left, and the number of emigrés diminished, could he at last breathe freely, and only then, as he put it, did the air of England once again smell sweet to him!

Months later, his mother, who had stayed behind in Benfica, died of a stroke, and Aunt Fanny came to Richmond to complete Afonso’s happiness, with her clear judgement, her white curls, and her discreet Minerva-like ways. There he was, then, living out his dream in a fine English house, set amid ancient trees and surrounded by vast pasturelands where pedigree cattle slept or grazed, and feeling that everything around him was healthy, strong, free and enduring – which was precisely what his heart wanted.

He made friends; he studied England’s rich and noble literature; as befitted a nobleman living in England, he took an interest in agriculture, horse-breeding, and charitable works, and it pleased him to think that he might stay there forever in that peaceful ordered world.

Afonso sensed, however, that his wife was unhappy. Pensive and sad, she wandered through the rooms, coughing. At night, she would sit by the fire, sighing and saying nothing.

Poor lady! Nostalgia for her homeland, family and Church was eating away at her. A true lisboeta, dark and diminutive, she did not complain, she merely smiled wanly, but, from the moment she had arrived in England, she had felt a secret loathing for that land of heretics and for its barbarous language; she was always cold and swathed in furs, she would gaze out in horror at the grey skies or at the snow on the trees, and her heart was never truly there, but far away in Lisbon, with its churchyards and its sunny streets. Her religious devotion (the devotion of the Runa family!), which had always been strong, grew more intense, strengthened by what she felt to be the prevailing hostility towards ‘Papists’. She was only happy in the evenings, when she could take refuge in the attic rooms with her Portuguese servants and say the rosary with them, kneeling on a mat, savouring, in those mumbled Ave Marias, spoken in a Protestant land, all the charm of a Catholic conspiracy!

Hating, as she did, everything English, she had refused to allow her son, Pedro, to study at the school in Richmond. Afonso’s assurances that it was a good, Catholic school were in vain. She would not have it: that particular brand of Catholicism, with no processions, no bonfires on St John’s night, no images of the Stations of the Cross, no monks in the streets, did not seem to her to be a religion at all. She would not abandon her son’s soul to heresy, and so she had Father Vasques – her father’s chaplain – come over from Lisbon to educate him.

Vasques taught Pedro the Latin declensions and, above all, the catechism, and Afonso da Maia’s face would cloud over with sadness whenever he returned from hunting or from the streets of London, from the lively hum of a life freely lived, and heard the dull voice of the priest issuing forth from the classroom, as if out of the depths of darkness:

‘Which are the enemies we must fight against all the days of our life?’

And in an even duller voice, the small boy would murmur:

‘The enemies which we must fight against all the days of our life are the devil, the world, and the flesh.’

Poor little Pedro! The only enemy of his soul was right there, in the form of the obese and none too clean Father Vasques, who belched as he sat slumped in an armchair, his snuff handkerchief on his knee.

Sometimes, Afonso felt so indignant that he would march into the room, interrupt the lesson on doctrine, grab Pedro’s hand and carry him off to run around with him beneath the trees by the Thames in an attempt to drive away the heavy gloom of the catechism with the river’s broad and generous light. The boy’s terrified mother, however, would immediately rush out and wrap the boy up in a large shawl; besides, out of doors, the boy, who had grown accustomed to being mollycoddled by maids and sitting in cosy cushioned corners, was afraid of the wind and the trees; and father and son would end up tramping over the dead leaves in glum silence, the son cowed by the shifting shadows cast by the trees and the father, shoulders bowed, deep in thought, saddened by his son’s pusillanimous nature.

Whenever he tried to tear the boy from his mother’s enervating embrace or from Father Vasques’ deadly catechism, the lady, always delicate in health, would immediately succumb to a fever. And Afonso did not dare to upset the poor invalid, so virtuous and so loving! At such times, he would go and sit with Aunt Fanny and unburden himself to her; the wise Irishwoman would merely place her spectacles between the pages of the book she was reading – an essay by Addison or a poem by Pope – and sadly shrug her shoulders. What could she do?

Maria Eduarda’s cough grew worse, just as her words grew sadder. She spoke now of ‘her last wish’ being to see the sun again! Why did they not go back to Benfica, to their home, now that the Infante Dom Miguel had been exiled and peace restored? Afonso, however, would not agree; he never again wanted to see his drawers smashed open with rifle butts, and he found Dom Pedro’s soldiers no more reassuring than Dom Miguel’s bailiffs.

At about this time, a great misfortune befell the house: in the cold March weather, Aunt Fanny died of pneumonia, and this loss only made Maria Eduarda’s melancholy still blacker, for she, too, had loved Aunt Fanny – for being Irish and a Catholic.

To distract her, Afonso took her off to Italy, to a delightful villa just outside Rome. There she did not lack for sun; it appeared punctually and generously every morning, bathing the terraces and gilding the laurels and the myrtles. And below them, among marble statues, was that precious, holy thing – the Pope!

But the sad lady continued to weep. What she really wanted was Lisbon, her novenas, her local saints, the processions that passed in a slow penitent murmur through the afternoons of sun and dust.

In order to console her, they had to go back to Benfica.

Then began a most unhappy existence. Maria Eduarda became gradually weaker, growing paler by the day, spending whole weeks reclining on a divan, her near-transparent hands resting on the heavy furs she had brought with her from England. Father Vasques took possession of that terrified soul, for whom God was a stern master, and he became the real man of the house. In the corridors, Afonso was constantly bumping into other religious figures, in cape and biretta, old Franciscans, or the occasional scrawny Capuchin on the scrounge; the house took on the musty smell of a sacristy; and from Maria Eduarda’s rooms came the incessant sound, slow and mournful, of the litany.

These saintly men ate his food and drank his port in the pantry. The administrator’s accounts were full of small pious allowances paid by the lady of the house: one Father Patrício had duped her out of two hundred cruzados for two hundred masses to be said for the soul of King José I.

Living surrounded by all this sanctimony aroused in Afonso feelings of rancorous atheism: he wanted all churches and monasteries closed, an axe taken to all images, and for the entire priesthood to be massacred. Whenever he heard the murmur of prayers in the house, he would escape down to the bottom of the garden, sit in the shade of the belvedere and read Voltaire; or he would go and vent his feelings to his old friend, Colonel Sequeira, who lived in a house in Queluz.

By then, Pedro was nearly a grown man. He was, however, as small and nervous as Maria Eduarda, having few of the characteristics and none of the robustness of the Maias; his lovely, dusky, oval face, and his marvellous irresistible eyes, always ready to fill with tears, gave him the appearance of a handsome Arab. He had developed slowly, showing no curiosity about anything, indifferent to toys, animals, flowers and books. No strong desire ever seemed to trouble that somnolent, passive soul, apart from the occasionally expressed desire to return to Italy. He had taken against Father Vasques, but did not dare disobey him. He was weak-willed in everything; and the continual despondency into which his whole being was plunged resolved itself into occasional crises of black melancholy which would render him, for days on end, silent, pale and listless, leaving him with dark circles under his eyes and looking prematurely aged. Up until then, his one strong, intense feeling had been his love for his mother.

Afonso had wanted to send him to Coimbra, but, at the very idea of being separated from her Pedro, the poor lady had fallen on her knees before Afonso, inarticulate and trembling, and he had, of course, given in at once to those supplicant hands, to the tears streaming down her poor waxen face. The boy remained at Benfica, going for slow rides on his horse, accompanied by a liveried servant, and frequenting Lisbon’s taverns, where he had already started drinking gin. There began to emerge in him then a great propensity for falling in love, and, at nineteen, he had his first bastard child.

Afonso da Maia consoled himself with the thought that the boy, despite having been horribly spoiled, did not entirely lack qualities: he was intelligent and healthy enough and, like all the Maias, brave; not long ago, he had soundly whipped three Lisbon louts armed with sticks who had assailed him in the street, calling him ‘a weed’.

When his mother died – after the long drawn-out death agony of the very devout, grappling with the terrors of going to Hell – Pedro’s grief bordered on madness. He had made an hysterical promise, that if she should live, he would sleep for a whole year on the flagstones in the courtyard; and once the coffin was gone, along with the priests, he fell into a state of silent, dull, tearless anguish from which he chose not to emerge, lying face down on his bed like some stubborn penitent. For many months, he remained plunged in sadness, and Afonso da Maia despaired to see this young man, his son and heir, a lugubrious figure in heavy mourning, leave the house each day like a monk to go and visit his mother’s tomb.

This period of extreme, morbid grief finally ended and was followed, almost seamlessly, by a period of dissipation and disorder, of banal debauchery, during which Pedro, swept along by a kind of crude romanticism, sought to submerge his longing for his mother in visits to brothels and taverns. However, given the unstable nature of that slightly crazed exuberance, so suddenly and wildly unleashed, it was also quickly spent.

After a year of riotous scenes in the Café Marrare and of derring-do at bull-runnings, after having ridden several horses into the ground and having booed many a performance at the Teatro de São Carlos, the old crises of nervous melancholy began to reappear; the days of glum silence, vast as deserts, returned, and these he spent at home, wandering the rooms, yawning or else lying prostrate beneath a tree in the garden, as if plunged into some well of bitterness. During such crises, he also became very devout; he would read The Lives of the Saints and visit the Exposition of the Holy Sacrament. These were the sudden dark nights of the soul which would, at one time, have led weak men to enter monasteries.

All this pained Afonso da Maia deeply; he preferred to hear that Pedro had rolled in from Lisbon in the early hours, exhausted and drunk, than to see him setting off like an old man, his breviary under his arm, heading for the church in Benfica.

And there was a thought now which, despite himself, occasionally came to torment him: he had noticed a strong resemblance between Pedro and one of his wife’s grandfathers, a Runa, of whom there was a portrait in Benfica: this extraordinary man, whose name the grown-ups often invoked to frighten the children, had gone mad, and, imagining himself to be Judas, hanged himself from a fig-tree.

All these excesses and crises, however, came to an abrupt end. Pedro da Maia fell in love! It was love Romeo-style, beginning with a fatal dazzling exchange of glances, one of those passions that do sometimes assail a life, laying waste to it like a hurricane, uprooting will, reason, human relationships and hurling them all into the abyss.

One afternoon, while sitting in the Café Marrare, he saw a blue calèche stop opposite, outside Madame Levaillant’s door, a calèche occupied by an old man wearing a white hat and by a young blonde woman wrapped in a cashmere shawl.

The old man was short and sturdy with a grey chinstrap beard, the sunburnt face of an old salt and a somewhat awkward air; he leaned heavily on the coachman as he got out of the carriage, as if badly afflicted by rheumatism, then limped into the dressmaker’s shop; and the woman turned very slowly and looked for a moment at the café.

Beneath the little roses adorning her black hat, her fair hair, the colour of dark gold, fell in soft waves over her small classical forehead; her marvellous eyes lit up her whole face; the chill air made her marble flesh still paler; and her grave statuesque profile, the noble curve of her shoulders and arms beneath the shawl drawn tight about them, made her seem to Pedro at that moment like some immortal being, too good for this Earth.

He had no idea who she was, but a tall, gaunt young man with a dark moustache and dressed all in black, who was standing next to Pedro, smoking and leaning against the door frame in a pose of utter tedium, noticed his friend’s intense interest, saw the burning, troubled gaze with which he followed the calèche as it trotted away up the Chiado, and came over to him, took his arm and said in his slow, gruff voice, his face close to Pedro’s:

‘Would you like me to tell you her name, Pedro, old chap? Her name, her family connections, with dates and all the principle facts? And will you buy your thirsty friend Alencar a bottle of champagne?’

The champagne duly arrived. And Alencar, having first run his bony fingers through his curly hair and smoothed the points of his moustache, leaned back, tugged at his shirt-cuffs and began:

‘One golden autumn afternoon …’

‘André!’ shouted Pedro to the waiter, thumping the marble table top. ‘Take the champagne away!’

In imitation of the actor Epifânio, Alencar bellowed:

‘What? And not quench the burning thirst of my lips?’

All right, the champagne could stay, but friend Alencar must forget that he was the poet of Voices of the Dawn and tell him in plain and simple language all about the owners of the blue calèche.

‘Very well, my friend, here it is!’

Two years before, at about the time Pedro had lost his mother, the old man, Monforte by name, had, one morning, burst onto Lisbon’s streets and into its society in that very calèche and with the same beautiful daughter by his side. No one knew who they were. They had rented the first floor of the Vargas mansion in Arroios, and the girl began frequenting the Teatro de São Carlos, where she had made an immediate impression, the kind of impression, said Alencar, which could easily bring on an aneurism. When she walked across the foyer, male shoulders would bow as if overwhelmed by the glow given off by that magnificent creature, who walked like a goddess, dragging her train behind her, and who, as if every night were gala night, was always décolleté and resplendent with jewels, even though she was as yet unmarried. Her father never gave her his arm; he would follow behind, his throat in the grip of a huge white cravat worthy of a majordomo and, in the golden light emanating from his daughter, looking even more the sunburnt sailor; indeed, he appeared shrunken, almost cowed, clutching to him opera glasses, libretto, a bag of sweets, a fan and an umbrella. It was in the box, however, when the light fell on her ivory neck and on her golden hair, that she seemed most truly an incarnation of some Renaissance ideal, a Titian model. The first time Alencar saw her, he had pointed first at her and then at the dark-complexioned ladies in the other boxes, exclaiming:

‘Gentlemen, she is like a shiny new gold ducat in a pile of old copper coins from the days of King João VI!’

Magalhães, that vile pirate, had stolen his words and put them in a magazine, but he, Alencar, had said it first!

Inevitably, various young men began to prowl around the mansion in Arroios, but no window ever opened. The servants, when questioned, said only that the young lady’s name was Maria and that the gentleman was called Manuel. A maid finally proved more forthcoming, once her palm had been crossed with silver: the gentleman was very silent, terrified of his daughter, and slept in a hammock; the lady lived in a nest of dark blue silk and spent the day reading novels. This was not enough to satisfy an impatient Lisbon. A slow, painstaking, methodical investigation was set in motion, in which he, Alencar, had taken part.

And the horrors that were uncovered! The father, Monforte, was from the Azores. When he was very young, a knife-fight which left a man dying on a street corner had forced him to flee on board a South American brig. Some time later, the administrator for the Taveira family, a certain Silva, who had known him in the Azores and was in Havana looking into setting up tobacco plantations, came across Monforte (whose real name was Forte) slouching around the port, waiting for a ship to take him to New Orleans. Here there was a blank in Monforte’s story. It seemed that he worked for some time as a foreman on a plantation in Virginia, and when he next resurfaced in the bright light of day, he was commanding the brig Nova Linda and carrying cargos of slaves to Brazil, Havana and New Orleans.

He had escaped the English sea patrols and earned a fortune from the skins of Africans, and now that he was rich, a man of reputation and a landowner, he went to the Teatro de São Carlos to hear Corelli sing. In this terrible chronicle, obscure and ill-documented, there were still, as Alencar put it, many gaps.

‘And what about the daughter?’ asked Pedro, who had listened, grave-faced and pale.

This his friend Alencar did not know. Where had Monforte found such a lovely blonde daughter? Who had the mother been? Where was she? Who had taught the daughter that majestic way of wrapping her cashmere shawl about her?

‘Those, my friend, are:

mysteries which Lisbon, however it probes,

will never unravel, and which God alone knows!’

Whatever the truth of the matter, once Lisbon had heard this tale of blood and negro slaves, its enthusiasm for Monforte’s daughter rapidly cooled. Really! Juno, it turned out, had a murderer’s blood running through her veins; the Titian beauty was the daughter of a slave-trader! The ladies, delighted to be able to pour scorn on a woman so blonde, so beautiful and with so many jewels, immediately dubbed her ‘the slaver’s daughter’, and now, whenever the daughter went to the theatre, Dona Maria da Gama affected to hide her face behind her fan, saying that she thought she could see on the young woman (especially when she wore those lovely rubies) the blood from the knife-thrusts inflicted by her Papa! In short, they slandered her vilely. After that first winter in Lisbon, the Monfortes disappeared, and furious rumours made the rounds: they were ruined, the police were after the old man, oh, and a thousand and one other wickednesses. Senhor Monforte, who suffered from rheumatism, was, in fact, calmly, deliciously, taking the waters in the Pyrenees. That was where Melo had met them.

‘Oh, so Melo knows them, does he?’ exclaimed Pedro.

‘Yes, my friend, Melo knows them.’

Pedro left the café soon afterwards; and that night, before going home, and despite the cold fine rain that was falling, he spent a whole hour, his imagination all afire, circling the dark, silent Vargas mansion. Two weeks later, when Alencar walked into the Teatro de São Carlos at the end of the first act of The Barber of Seville, he was amazed to see Pedro da Maia installed in the Monfortes’ box, at the front, next to Maria, and wearing a scarlet camellia in the buttonhole of his tailcoat – identical to the camellias in the bouquet resting on the velvet balustrade.