The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers E-Book

Eça De Queiroz

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

One night at the theatre, Vitor da Silva, a young law graduate, sees a strikingly beautiful woman. Her name is Genoveva. Originally from Madeira, she has lived for many years in Paris. Her rich French husband has died and she is in Lisbon with a view possibly to settling there. Genoveva, however, is not what she seems. Behind the mutual attraction between her and Vitor lies a terrible secret.

Leseprobe

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:

The City and the Mountains – Eça de Queiroz

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:

Alves & Co. and other stories – Eça de Queiroz

The Illustrious House of Ramires – Eça de Queiroz

THE TRANSLATOR

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers. She won the 1992 Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, and her translations of Eca de Queiroz’s novels The Relic (1996) and The City and the Mountains (2009) were shortlisted for the prize; with Javier Marias, she won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White, and, in 2000, she won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Jose Saramago’s All the Names. In 2008 she won the Pen Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize and The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eca de Queiroz.

She has translated the following books for Dedalus: The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui and The River by Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, Lucio’s Confession and The Great Shadow by Mario de Sa-Carneiro, The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy (with Annella McDermott), The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy (eds. Eugenio Lisboa and Helder Macedo), Spring and Summer Sonatas and Autumn and Winter Sonatas by Ramon del Valle-Inclan, and, by Eca de Queiroz: The Mandarin, The Relic, The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, The Crime of Father Amaro, Cousin Bazilio, The Maias, The City and the Mountains and Alves & Co.

Margaret Jull Costa is currently translating The Mystery of the Sintra Road by Eca de Queiroz.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The translator would like to thank Manucha Lisboa and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.

INTRODUCTION

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz was born on 25th November 1845 in the small town of Povoa 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. 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 did marry – 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 when Eça himself was forty. His father did, however, pay for his son’s studies at boarding school and at Coimbra University, where Eça studied Law. Like the character of Vítor in The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, Eça was not at all drawn to the legal profession. Instead, he joined the diplomatic service, working as consul in Havana (1872–74), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1874–79), Bristol (1879–88) and, finally, Paris, where he served until his death in 1900.

He began writing stories and essays, which were published in the Gazeta de Portugal, 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. The novels he wrote in the next thirty years were all biting satires on, for example, celibacy and the priesthood (The Crime of Father Amaro, 1875), the romantic ideal of passion (Cousin Basílio, 1878), religious and social hypocrisy (The Relic, 1887) and, in what is generally considered to be his masterpiece, The Maias (1888), the disintegration and decadence of Portuguese society. Only in his last novel, The City and the Mountains (1901), did he appear to soften, praising the simple rustic life and condemning life in the city.

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The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers was only published in Portuguese in 1980, when Eça’s work went out of copyright. Three editions came out almost simultaneously, all based on a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon. Many Eça scholars were horrified that what they considered to be an unfinished work by Eça should be made public. Eça, they argued, had clearly chosen not to publish it during his lifetime and his wishes should be respected.

We do not know definitively why Eça chose not to publish the novel. It was part of a planned twelve-volume series entitled Crónicas da Vida Sentimental, intended to be a gallery of nineteenth-century Portugal, a project that came to nothing. It is possible that his heirs may have been put off by the apparently unfinished nature of the manuscript or possibly by the subject matter, but Eça himself wrote of the novel in 1877: ‘It’s not immoral or indecent. It’s cruel.’ He added that he thought it ‘the best, most interesting novel I have yet written’, infinitely superior to his Cousin Basílio, and ‘a real literary and moral bombshell’.

Could Eça have decided not to publish the book because the feelings and incidents described in it were simply too close to home? Eça’s novels, unsurprisingly, abound in orphans being shuffled off to live with aunts and uncles; here, Vítor’s childhood trajectory – wetnurse, aunt, friend of family and, finally, uncle – is the one that most closely follows Eça’s own. But there is also the secrecy and shame surrounding Vítor’s birth and, possibly more importantly, the void at the centre of Vítor’s life which only Genoveva can fill. When he wakes up after Genoveva’s first soirée, the memory of her fills his soul ‘with all the sweetness of a mother’s kiss’, and, later, life without her affection seems to him unacceptable, her affection being ‘the sweetest thing he had ever known, an affirmation of his self-worth’. These deep longings for the love of a mother, however unconscious, are complicated by the fact that the woman who becomes his lover is not only his mother but also a high-class prostitute. There is something deeply unsettling and possibly vengeful about this conjunction in one character of what are traditionally regarded as the highest and lowest of female roles. The mother who abandons her child is portrayed as selfish, immoral, unnatural and doomed to a terrible death. Although no one would suggest that there was an incestuous relationship between Eça and his mother, nevertheless, given the similarities between his and Vítor’s background, would incest between mother and son – with the mother depicted as a corrupt, mercenary courtesan – have violated too great a taboo and been too potentially wounding to his own family? Could Vítor’s longing for a mother’s love have been seen as an implicit criticism of Eça’s own mother? Was there a danger of fact and fiction becoming dangerously blurred? We will, of course, probably never know. It is interesting to note, though, that when Eça returned to the theme of incest in The Maias (which he began writing shortly after abandoning The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers), the incest is between brother and sister, rather than mother and son.

As to the unfinished nature of the book, while it is true that Eça had still not settled on a title or even on the names of one or two minor characters and that there are occasional non sequiturs or redundancies, in my view, the novel still stands as an utterly convincing whole, providing us with an acid portrait of a society in which everyone and everything has its price. It gives us, above all, the truly extraordinary figure of Genoveva, a self-made woman if ever there was one, who knows almost to the date when her looks will cease to be saleable. Genoveva is, it is true, a rapacious schemer, and yet while one is repelled by her lack of scruples, one cannot but be seduced by her sheer energy and by her passionate commitment to grasping what she perceives as her last chance of happiness with Vítor. She is, ultimately, a tragic figure, for, having rejected motherhood and motherly love when she abandoned Vítor as a baby, she is ultimately destroyed when that love reappears in perverted form.

In Vítor, on the other hand, we have a brilliant portrait of a man in search of definition, an emotional orphan, whose feelings change with the wind. He is full of bravado and ambitious plans – he will run away with Genoveva, he will be a successful lawyer or a famous writer. When he does become a published poet, his poetry is a poor imitation of a minor French writer and is published in a women’s magazine.

Eça also gives us a gallery of vividly drawn minor characters, particularly at the two parties held by Genoveva – Dâmaso, the plump fool soon parted from his money, blunt-speaking, honest Uncle Timóteo, the tender extrovert, Sarrotini, the unctuous João Marinho. These ‘soirées’ are provincial caricatures of their Paris equivalent and give Eça plenty of scope for poking fun at what he perceived to be third-rate bourgeois Lisbon society. Eça, as always, finds gold in the very mediocrity he is mocking, and the result is a novel that is both tragic and richly comic.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE STREET OF FLOWERS

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

Series

Copyright

I

It was in the Teatro da Trindade, at a performance of Bluebeard.

The second act had already begun, and the chorus of courtesans were just bowing and retreating in an arc to the back of the stage, when, in a box to the left of the circle, the rusty creak of a stiff door lock and the scrape of a chair drew a few distracted glances. A rather tall woman was standing in the box, slowly undoing the silver clasps on a long black silk cape lined with fur; the hood of the cape was still up, but nevertheless afforded an impression of large, dark eyes in an oval, aquiline face; whether natural or artificial, the faint shadows beneath her eyes lent seriousness and profundity to her gaze. With her was a thin woman, wearing a gold watch chain strung across a vulgar silk bodice; the thin woman took her companion’s cape from her, and she, with a light, delicate movement, turned and stood very still, studying the stage.

The lethargic audience immediately stirred into life. Opera glasses were trained on her – ‘a veritable fusillade’, to quote Roma, the esteemed author of Idylls and Dreams; a fat fellow, standing just below her box, was so anxious to get a look at her that he turned round rather too suddenly, slipped on a step and fell over, to loud guffaws; while the fat man, very angry and red in the face, was rubbing his rear, the woman leaned forward and spoke to her thin companion, who remained perched on the edge of her chair, respectful as a maidservant, stiff-backed as a religious zealot. She had a large red nose, her hair was combed flat to her head, and her submissive smile revealed long, carnivorous teeth; in order to view the stage, she carefully donned a pair of spectacles. She was clearly some sort of ageing English governess.

The talk in the circle was that the beautiful unknown woman must be the Princess of Breppo, a poor, distant relative of the House of Savoy. The withered old Countess de Triães, sporting a white camellia in her grey hair, even wondered if ‘the king would notice’; but the king sat motionless, leaning on the edge of the box; he was wearing blue-tinted pince-nez and an admiral’s uniform with vast gold epaulettes; the queen, looking lovely in purple, her bejewelled fingers resting on her cheek, was still smiling at the grotesque stage antics of ‘Count Oscar’. They did not even notice ‘the princess’. Some said she had been expected to stop off in Lisbon on her way to Brazil, where she was going in order to escape importunate creditors or to pursue an interest in the flora of the Americas or to shake off the tedium of Europe.

That night was a benefit performance, and the theatre was packed. In another box, in a lilac dress, her hair like a stiff helmet, sat the plump, white Viscountess de Rosarim, whose virtuous nature was the talk of Lisbon and caused people to mutter angrily and impatiently: ‘The woman must be stupid!’

Beside her, hiding behind a large, black fan, was Miss Ginamá from Bahia, a glimpse of whose silk stockings was enough to provoke uncontrolled lubricity amongst the populace. Opposite, sitting in the midst of her devout, respectable family, was Mercês Pedrão, whose habit, so it was rumoured, was to bestow on any man under fifty-five who came near her the knowing but prudent caresses of a voluptuary. And in the farthest-flung box sat two sad negroes with diamond pins in their shirtfronts.

Slender Father Agnaldo was up in the circle, wearing gold-rimmed pince-nez and with his hair combed carefully over his bald pate; he was a great success in the Café Martinho where he would spend the nights making mock of church dogma and drinking chartreuse; there too was Carvalhosa, now a deputy, but who still bore the traces on his jaundiced skin of the vices he had loved too well at university; also present was the esteemed poet, Roma, who, when he was happy, would invent comical words and, when in more splenetic vein, would sing of the moonlight in the valleys and of his love for certain duchesses, and who, whether sad or gay, was always running grimy fingers through his scurf-ridden hair.

Dear, kind Baldonísio, clean-shaven and bald, teetered from one box to another, his hips swaying, his voice trilling out soft as a cricket’s; he observed all the fast days and was much loved by devout aristocrats. The ladies beamed at the illustrious pianist, Fonseca, who kept fiddling with his glasses and who, the day before, had published a waltz called ‘The Throne Waltz’, which he had dedicated to their majesties. Padilhão, sociable as ever and much in demand for his ability to imitate actors, animals, the whistling of a train and the sad sound of an oboe, was also much in evidence.

One noisy box was packed with heavily made-up Spanish women, whilst in the stalls down below, amidst the drab of army uniforms, one caught the occasional faint glimmer of an officer’s insignia. The heat and the mingled breath of so many people crammed together made for a suffocating atmosphere. The more obese members of the audience were perspiring and fluttering their fans. Hands wearing gloves made of oxblood, bottle green or mustard yellow leather smoothed trim goatee beards. In the balcony, a child was crying obstinately. And the anonymous masses – people who eat, procreate and die anonymously – looked blankly about them with dark eyes.

The unknown woman took up her opera glasses and trained them for a moment on the queen, on the stiff, flowery coiffures of the ladies, on the fine, gallant profile of Dom João da Maia and on the Spanish girls. Occasionally, she would smile and talk to the scrawny governess. She was blonde, either natural or dyed, and was wearing a dress in pearl-coloured silk, with a modest, square neckline; a black enamel pendant set with tiny diamonds and threaded onto a pale ribbon nestled on her breast, which was the colour of warm milk.

Two men in the circle seemed particularly fascinated by her. One of them kept smiling broadly, fidgeting in his seat, polishing the lenses of his opera glasses and staring up at her, elbows akimbo; he was a short, chubby man in his thirties, with a fuzz of black beard on his plump face. His name was Dâmaso Mavião, but he was known to everyone as Dâmaso. He was rich and well respected. His father had been a moneylender, but Dâmaso wore a ring bearing a coat of arms; it was, almost without modification, the coat of arms of the Count de Malgueiro, a decrepit gambler and hardened drinker, to whom Dâmaso, believing it the chic thing to do, gave the occasional silver coin. He was wearing beige trousers, and beneath his waistcoat gleamed a shirtfront with coral buttons in the form of little hands each holding a golden pencil.

The other fellow, a young man of twenty-three, stood motionless, his arms folded, studying her as intently as one might a famous painting. He was doubtless thinking that he had never before seen such alluring, desirable beauty, such splendid, warm, white skin, such long eyelashes so gracefully lowered and raised. The curve of her throat and breast was lovelier than anything he had seen in statues or engravings, and her mass of golden hair must, he thought, be silken and heavy to the touch and have the soft warmth of living things. Her flesh must exude a subtle perfume and be so exceptionally sensitive and supple as to make any man tremble. He imagined that the silk dress she wore would have its own vitality, as if it were another skin. He marvelled at the smoothly elegant way she turned her head, and when she removed her long eighteen-buttoned glove, he stared in wonderment at her bracelet – a snake which coiled five times about her arm and seemed to rest its flat head, set with two large rubies like two bloodshot eyes, on her white flesh.

Dâmaso had stated categorically that ‘she must be a princess’ and that idea made her feel infinitely distant from the young man, as if she were lost in some glorious long ago, with all the haughty pride of an historic family and the inaccessibility of queens. What had her past life been? What would her voice be like? What feelings did she have? Had she ever been in love? With whom? He could only imagine her lavishly dressed, striking stately poses; he could not even think of her in a bedroom, wearing a simple white nightgown; she belonged in high-ceilinged, damasked salons hung with standards, where phalanxes of pages bowed as she passed.

What was she doing there, then, in a box at the Teatro da Trindade, with an ugly paid companion? Would she have the candour of a poetic soul? Could she love just anyone? What form would her love take? What delicate gestures would she make when she gave herself to a lover, what fine words would she utter? Surely she would inspire a fanatical, almost religious devotion. Who could possibly ever possess such a creature?

These vague thoughts came naturally to a young man of a sentimental, melancholy turn of mind. His name was Vítor da Silva, a law graduate, who lived with his Uncle Timóteo and worked in the offices of the lugubrious Dr Caminha. He had brought back with him from university, and from his literary acquaintances there, a kind of hazy romanticism, a morbid sadness, a dislike of all activity and a distaste for his profession. He had read a great deal of Musset, Byron and Tennyson; he himself wrote poetry and had had some poems published in newspapers and magazines: The Dream of Dom João, Flowers of Snow, a few sonnets. He had recently been working on a short poem about King Arthur and the Round Table, the Holy Grail and Lancelot. The brute imperfection of everyday life filled him with melancholy. He still lived in hope of finding a lover like Juliet and, although contact with blunt reality had made him lose some of his romantic ideas, his complete lack of any sense of irony allowed him to continue to venerate the ideal. He got up late, loathed the legal profession in which he worked, was a republican and a dandy.

‘Look, she understands Portuguese,’ Dâmaso suddenly exclaimed, elbowing Vítor.

‘How do you know?’

‘Can’t you see, she’s laughing at Isidoro.’

The second act was drawing to an end. The conductor was bouncing up and down, brandishing the baton, the violin bows rose and fell as the violinists sawed away; the piccolos sang out shrilly, while the bespectacled man playing the bass drum, with a scarf over one shoulder, dealt the drumskin soft, sleepy blows with his drumsticks. On stage, Carlota, in a terrible state, the train of her dress all dirty, was dragging herself through the court, whining:

I bet that fat old fishwife

Was once the bane of his life

And the ladies of the chorus, their hair dishevelled, pretended to be deeply shocked, raising now one arm, now the other, as stiffly as puppets. The fat, scarlet ‘queen’ was sweating; ‘El-Rei Bobeche’ was drooling; and the audience burst into laughter and applause when he and ‘Count Oscar’, playing the fool on the royal armchairs on stage, suddenly swung round and put the soles of their feet together to form the converging legs of a ludicrous W.

The curtain fell. There was a rising murmur of voices; people puffed out their cheeks in the heat; fans fluttered, and the people in the boxes and the circles gradually fell silent and stared into space, hot and weary; people yawned or peered vaguely round the theatre through their opera glasses.

A group of men standing at the door to the circle were examining the unknown woman; speculative comments were made: Was she really a princess? But someone said that the princess in question was a little old lady with a chignon. Perhaps she was the new leading lady at the Teatro de São Carlos. Then a grey-haired man with a slight stutter joined the group and said knowledgeably:

‘She’s a tart!’

Since he was a person who had visited both Madrid and Paris on government business, his opinions, whether on debauchery or cuisine, were always highly respected. And two broad-backed Brazilians left the group disconsolately, muttering:

‘She’s one of those French women on the make. Rio’s full of them.’

But everyone agreed that she was certainly a tasty piece, and her décolletage was highly praised. A pale gaunt youth, jacket tightly buttoned, narrow-brimmed hat flat on his head like a plate, and carrying a murderous-looking walking stick, made all eyes glitter when he muttered hoarsely:

‘I wouldn’t mind getting her alone!’

They discussed loudly whether her hair was natural or dyed. They were all good friends and so addressed each other as ‘old fool’ and ‘idiot’. One lawyer got very irate and bet two libras that her hair was dyed.

She, meanwhile, had gone to sit at the back of the box, talking now and then to the Englishwoman and looking rather tired, smothering yawns with one small hand, the rings on her fingers glinting in the semidarkness. Vítor da Silva, who could not now see her from his seat, was about to get up and sit further forward, at the front of the circle, when he saw a man he knew, Joaquim Marinho, go into the box.

Marinho was from Trás-os-Montes in the far north of Portugal, but had lived in Paris for years. He had inherited a strip of impoverished land near Bragança, but according to his friends – who said of him respectfully and with a lift of the eyebrow: ‘He’s a sly one, Marinho!’ – he had got rich in Paris, and people spoke gravely of ‘Marinho’s fortune’. He was short, slightly built, almost bald and sported a fine blonde beard; he had small feet and moved almost noiselessly; he smiled easily and, when he spoke, had a habit of rubbing his hands together. He was so extravagantly polite, it was almost embarrassing. He called everyone ‘my dear friend’ and always had a few chocolate bonbons in his pockets for the ladies. He was so eager to please that he would quite happily post a letter for someone or deliver a package to the customs office. Should a peer of the realm or a director-general speak to him of the weather or about the latest bullfights, he would listen, eyes wide, biting his lower lip, as if astonished at such rare words of wisdom. He would buy beer for the capitalists in Balthreschi’s patisserie and say a few paternal words to the younger men, slipping his arm around their waist and whispering lubricious comments about dancers. He always wore magnificent overcoats, and if anyone complimented him on this, he would immediately take off the coat and display the cloth in a favourable light, showing off the lining and the excellent seams, and say quietly:

‘A bargain. It’s the first time I’ve worn it – it’s yours for five libras.’

He was always doing deals. People said of him: ‘Marinho has a very sharp eye for business!’ He almost always dined out and claimed to suffer from neuralgia.

Vítor was surprised at his familiarity with the stranger. Marinho had grasped both her hands, smiling broadly. He had picked up her opera glasses and muttered something to her that made her laugh. She was certainly no princess, and the thought made Vítor feel suddenly strangely happy.

Dâmaso agreed and, standing at the circle door with the others and stroking his beard, he said:

‘If she’s so very friendly with Marinho, she’s clearly no princess.’

And they all decided that she must be the new leading lady at the Teatro de São Carlos.

‘We’ve got ourselves a woman, then,’ exclaimed Dâmaso. ‘If she tries to play the fine lady, she’ll be booed off.’

And turning to the gaunt young man with the murderous walking stick, he said:

‘Are you dining afterwards, Viscount?’

‘Hmm,’ the Viscount said in his nasal tones, which meant ‘Yes’.

But the stocky, illustrious pianist Fonseca said that the new leading lady was thin and short, with jet-black hair.

Marinho would enlighten them. And since he was at that very moment emerging from the unknown woman’s box, they gathered round him in the corridor.

‘Who is she? Who is she?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know!’

‘Come on, Marinho!’

He stroked his beard, laughing to himself. Then, head on one side, he said confidentially:

‘A lady of the best society, the very best!’

‘Is she French?’

‘Oh, really …’

He smiled, warding off their questions. People stood on tiptoe around him; one of the king’s courtiers, a pleasant, witty fellow, put his hand to his ear; a decrepit, deaf old gentleman, wearing an enormous top hat, asked a great hulk of a man with a pointed goatee beard to tell him what Marinho had said. The hulk bowed respectfully and addressed him as ‘Count’.

Finally, Marinho, hemmed in, pressed up against a wall beneath a gaslamp, scraping the whitewash with the sole of one of his shoes, told them everything. He had met her in Paris, in the house of Baroness de Villecreuse, a most respectable lady, separated from her husband, who lives in the Champs-Elysées, near Madame de Sagan. Turning to a pompous, potbellied man with a grey beard, he said:

‘You know the place, don’t you, Vasconcelos?’

The man replied in the shrill tones of a cricket:

‘I adore it.’

‘Well, that’s where I met her. She invited me to dine at her house a few times. Her name is Madame de Molineux. She’s Portuguese, from Madeira. Molineux, the old devil, was a senator of the Empire. God, you ate well in that house!’ And he rolled his eyes in delight. ‘The Molineux are a very old Normandy family. After that disastrous business at Sedan, the old chap went to Belgium, where he died. And that’s all I know about her. She’s called Genoveva.’

Then someone asked:

‘Who’s the other woman?’

‘A companion, a kind of maid. An Englishwoman. I’m coming, I’m coming!’ he said in response to Dâmaso, who was beckoning to him.

The bell was ringing; the group dispersed. And Marinho, putting his arm about Dâmaso’s waist, said:

‘What is it?’

‘That woman, is she with anyone?’

Marinho opened his arms wide and, lowering his voice, said:

‘Chi lo sa?’

And Dâmaso, in a still quieter voice and grasping Marinho by the lapel of his jacket, said:

‘You couldn’t introduce me, could you?’

‘Why, of course. She even asked me to bring someone along in the next interval! It’s not strictly etiquette to introduce anyone at the theatre … but here … and, besides, she did ask me.’

The orchestra was accompanying the aria:

Fresh young loves,

I plucked them like flowers …

‘I’ll see you later, then,’ said Dâmaso.

But Marinho held him back and walked the length of the corridor with him, arm in arm, bending towards him, talking urgently.

‘But when do you need it?’ asked Dâmaso.

‘If possible, tomorrow,’ replied Marinho. ‘I’ll drop by your house. I do apologise, but I’m really strapped for cash … And it’s all a complete fuss about nothing. It could only ever happen here. A hotel in France would never pester a gentleman, a person known to them, for the miserable sum of 62,000 mil réis. Ridiculous! So tomorrow it is, eh? And we’ll go and see that woman at the end of the next act. And, remember, don’t hold back!’

He rubbed his hands vigorously, laughing silently, then, with a bow, went back into the box belonging to the Viscountess de Rosarim, ‘our virtuous beauty’, as he called her.

Dâmaso returned to the circle triumphant; he eyed Madame de Molineux as if taking possession of her, and began putting on his gloves. Leaning towards Vítor, he said:

‘Marinho’s going to introduce me!’

And he told Vítor that she was a countess from Paris and very chic! And she was Portuguese too! Who would think it? ‘What a woman, though. I’d give her anything she wanted!’

He was very sure of himself. Generally speaking, he was thought to be a bit of a dandy and people said of him: ‘That lucky devil Dâmaso is never without a woman!’ A fat actress from the Teatro Príncipe Real, a magician’s assistant, had tried to kill herself by eating the heads of matches, and all because of him. He was much in demand amongst the Spanish girls, and his sentimental curriculum vitae even included an aristocratic episode in Sintra, where he was caught in flagrante with the Countess de Aguiar in the Capuchin monastery. The countess was, and still is, like a dish served at table, which you received from the person on your right and passed to the person on your left. Since then, Dâmaso had looked women straight in the eye, pulling at his beard, and when, at three o’clock each afternoon, he pranced across Largo dos Mártires on his horse, he felt that Lisbon was his to command.

Vítor, who said nothing, now found her even more captivating. She had lived in Paris, he thought, amongst lofty, original beings; she had visited the Tuileries; and the weary, defiling gaze of the old Silent Emperor had doubtless fallen on her beautiful shoulder blades. She had met famous authors, visited notable artists’ studios, and everything he had read or heard about Paris clustered around her like a natural adornment, and she became associated vaguely in his mind with the spirit of Dumas fils, with Doré’s engravings and Gounod’s music, with the old generals of the Jockey Club and the refinements of the Café Anglais – the whole wonderful framework of a superior civilization.

Meanwhile, on stage, five grubby women, with inelegantly curled hair and low necklines revealing bony clavicles, were standing in a line shrilly singing to a jerky rhythm:

Left for dead in the grave,

I came straight back to life,

Straight back to life, back to life …

Then from the door of the circle, Marinho, on tiptoe, was signalling to Dâmaso. In his haste, Dâmaso stumbled over a child, who started to cry, and knocked the opera glasses out of the hand of an extremely large woman. He was very pale.

An old lady, slumped in her seat behind Vítor, remarked with satisfaction:

‘He must have got the colic.’

‘It’s those sorbets they eat,’ muttered her neighbour sourly. And the five scrawny women standing in a line, once more took up the shrill refrain:

Left for dead in the grave,

I came straight back to life,

Straight back to life …

Marinho led Dâmaso into Madame de Molineux’s box, introduced him and left discreetly. She bowed her head gracefully and, indicating the Englishwoman, said:

‘Miss Sarah Swan.’

Dâmaso bowed again. His face was now bright red.

‘Do you speak English?’ asked Miss Sarah.

‘I learned at school, but I’ve forgotten it all.’

Miss Sarah bared her teeth in a smile, coughed, and adjusting her glasses, looked back at the stage.

Madame de Molineux turned slightly towards Dâmaso, who asked her hurriedly:

‘Are you enjoying yourself?’

‘Oh, yes, very much.’

She affected a slight foreign accent.

‘Have you seen the operetta before?’

‘Yes, I think I have, at the Variétés in Paris, I believe.’

‘A very different experience, I imagine,’ remarked Dâmaso.

She agreed politely, smiling.

There was a silence. Dâmaso, who had grown still redder, was slowly stroking his beard; sweat was trickling down his back. Then the curtain was lowered, and the interval hubbub started up again. Madame de Molineux withdrew to the back of the box and, as she brushed past Dâmaso, the noble beauty of her person, the rustle of silk, her penetrating perfume, made him bow slightly.

He saw that several pairs of opera glasses were trained on him; he wanted to appear animated, chic, and in an over-loud voice and making a sweeping gesture, he asked:

‘Have you been in Lisbon long?’

She conferred with Miss Sarah and said:

‘Just five days.’

And Dâmaso, in a sudden verbal flurry, plied her with questions:

Was this her first time in Lisbon?

It was. She had gone straight from Madeira to London and from there to Paris …

Did she like Lisbon? ‘Very much!’ Had she been to the gardens in the Passeio Público, to the Teatro de Sâo Carlos? ‘Yes.’ Had she been to Sintra? ‘No.’

She was sitting slightly slumped in her chair, her hands in her lap, holding her closed fan. Her hands were slender and white, but strong, as if accustomed to holding the reins of a horse and to an active life.

Dâmaso then offered her his house in Colares, should she wish to visit Sintra. It was a student’s house … But seeing her slightly surprised look, he blushed and added:

‘I myself am living in Lisbon at present; I always spend the winter in Lisbon.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, interrupting him, ‘but who’s that lady in dark blue opposite us?’

It was the Countess de Val-Moral. Dâmaso pretended he was an intimate friend of hers. ‘I could tell you about everyone in Lisbon,’ he declared. ‘Oh yes, I know absolutely everyone.’

He was growing animated. He mentioned a number of ladies; he thought it witty to speak of scandals; he pointed out a few well-born young men; he spoke of bullfighting; he even imitated the actor Isidoro.

Opening her fan with a weary gesture, she murmured:

‘Hm, interesting …’

Dâmaso was convinced he was making an excellent impression. He grew excited; he pulled off his gloves; he asked to have a look at her fan. And, leaning on the edge of the box, he half-turned his back on the circle.

‘Of all the ladies here,’ she was saying, ‘the only real lady is the Queen.’ Putting one finger to her brow and frowning slightly, she asked: ‘Now what family is she from?’

Dâmaso was quick to remind her that the Queen was the daughter of Victor Emmanuel, from the House of Savoy.

‘Of course, how silly of me! She’s the sister of Humberto. Such a fine young man, don’t you think?’

‘So people say … yes, so everyone says …’

‘Two years ago in Paris, I often used to go riding with him in the mornings. Isn’t it the custom in Lisbon to go riding in the morning?’

‘It certainly is!’

He then listed his own horses; he had three: one for riding, one for the phaeton, and one for the coupé, at night.

They discussed horseracing. She had been to the Derby, at Epsom. Dâmaso praised the course at Belém. He had heard foreigners say there was no better view from the stands in the world; it was as good as anything anywhere.

‘They even speak English at the weigh-in.’

And leaning back, he smoothed his moustache.

Then Madame de Molineux wanted to know who the ladies were in box … box 20 in the second row. They were the Spanish girls, who wore camellias in their monstrous coiffures and layers of powder on their small, round faces. There were constant bangings on the door of the box, which would fluster the girls and set them whispering. They would fan themselves furiously and, leaning forward, scrutinise the circle and the stalls with devouring eyes and then, suddenly, for appearance’s sake, freeze in ridiculously rigid poses.

Dâmaso looked, smiled, pretended to be embarrassed and then, hoping to be witty, said in mangled French:

‘They’re the demi-mondes.’

‘Ah!’ And Madame Molineux calmly picked up her opera glasses to get a good look at the Spanish contingent. ‘One of them’s not bad-looking,’ she said.

‘Oh, that’ll be Lola!’ Dâmaso exclaimed involuntarily, then bit his lip and blushed scarlet.

Madame de Molineux merely asked:

‘Are there restaurants where one can dine after the theatre, something like the Café Anglais at the Maison d’Or?’

‘Alas, no. We’re a very backward country. There’s Silva’s of course, and the Malta.’

‘And what mass do people attend?’

Dâmaso recommended the one o’clock mass at the church of Loreto. A lot of people went there.

The Englishwoman had remained silent all this while. Sometimes, for no reason, she would turn to Madame de Molineux and bestow on her a humble smile, or she would peer through her opera glasses at one particular man, before returning to her strict immobility, fixing her dull blue eyes on some point in space. Madame de Molineux yawned.

‘I’m afraid I’m rather tired. I got up very early to see off a friend on the ship bound for Brazil.’

‘Ah, of course, it left today.’

Then, since the orchestra was tuning up, Dâmaso prepared to leave:

‘Your humble servant, madam.’

‘I receive visitors at the Hotel Central between two and four,’ she said with a curt nod.

Dâmaso returned to the circle, radiant, and dropping into his seat beside Vítor, muttered:

‘I’ve got myself a woman.’

Then, leaning back, he started ‘giving her the eye’.

But Madame de Molineux was standing up and, in an instant, she was wrapped in her silk pelisse, the hood again almost covering her face.

Dâmaso leaped to his feet, very agitated.

‘Come on,’ he said to Vítor, ‘come on, man.’

They ran downstairs and stood by the door. The lanterns on the waiting carriage lit the dark street; young lads, each with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, were also waiting; the colonnade was deserted, its walls plastered with cheap advertisements, offering translation services; in the café, a waiter was leaning against a column, reading a crumpled newspaper by the light of the gaslamp; another waiter was stretched out on one of the marble-topped tables, dozing; and from the back came the monotonous click of billiard balls. Then there was a rustle of silk; it was Madame de Molineux. She was quite tall and the pelisse she wore was very full; picking up the train of her dress, she revealed the lace of her petticoats and the black silk of her stockings.

Dâmaso stepped forward, and they stood chatting at the door while a boy raced desperately down the street, calling for the coachman for the Hotel Central.

Vítor, standing out of the wind, his heart pounding, was fumbling nervously with a cigarette. The whiteness of the petticoat, as well as the woman’s noble stature and the lavish embroidery on her pelisse all troubled him as if he were in the presence of some superior being. Dâmaso was swaying back and forth, beating his stick against his trousers; he was apparently talking about the weather; it was a dark night of shivering stars.

But then Madame de Molineux turned and appeared to notice Vítor for the first time; for a moment she rested on him her dark, shining eyes, which seemed even larger beneath her hood. But the boy came running back, out of breath, in the wake of the hotel coupé. Dâmaso bowed and she, on the pretext of getting a better grip on her train, turned again and looked directly at Vítor.

He stood there in suspense, surprised. The carriage door closed and the carriage bore her away.

Dâmaso said to Vítor: ‘Let’s go and have supper at the Malta, shall we?’ And as they walked down the street, he was smugly whistling the march from Faust.

Vítor said nothing. He could feel the blood flowing unusually fast in his veins. Carriages were leaving the Teatro de São Carlos, groups of people passed them, women’s cloaks gleamed white in the night. And he found Lisbon interesting; he wanted to publish a poem, or be applauded in a theatre and generally be considered an important person.

When they entered the Malta, the waiter approached them, yawning, and turned up the gaslight; a crude, tremulous light struck the walls and the low ceiling; in a bored voice, he asked:

‘And what can I do for you, gentlemen?’

Dâmaso was studying himself in the mirror opposite, fiddling with his beard; he felt bohemian, alive and full of energy.

II

When Vítor came down to breakfast the next day at eleven o’clock, his Uncle Timóteo was in the living room, in his armchair by the window which stood open to the luminous morning; he was reading the papers, with one leg curled beneath him, oriental fashion, and the other, which was made of wood, resting on the window sill.

They lived in a third-floor apartment in Rua de São Francisco, a little way down from the Writers’ Guild. It was early December and the winter had so far been very dry, the air clean and clear, the skies intensely blue and with plenty of good sun for old men.

Uncle Timóteo was sixty years old; he was small and thin, talkative and enthusiastic. He had dark, mobile features, prominent cheekbones and sparkling eyes, a white mane of hair and bold white sideburns which stopped half-way across his cheeks. He was a retired judge and had spent all his working life abroad; he had lived longest in India, where he had lost his leg while out hunting birds, which annoyed him, because – according to him – he should, at the very least, have left his leg in the jaws of a tiger. He had always been more of a soldier than a judge. As a student at Coimbra University, he had been a troublemaker and a fighter, and, later on, in his courtroom, he had often thumped so hard on the table that the dark-skinned native lawyers had turned pale. Wherever he went, he was in permanent conflict with the authorities; he had even given a beating to a secretary-general of India, a peace-loving fellow who wrote odes and suffered with his digestion. But people respected his severe brand of honesty because, beneath that impetuous exterior, he was also extremely kind and compassionate and even susceptible to certain finer feelings.

He was a great supporter of the underdog and would ride to the rescue as boldly as any paladin. A nursemaid shaking a child in the street, a carter tyrannizing an ox, a boy scalding a cat would immediately find Uncle Timóteo bearing down upon them, with his thunderous voice and his silver-tipped cane.

His wife, an excellent lady from Macau, had left him eighty contos, which, he said, meant that he could afford to keep both a carriage and a nephew. He gave all his love to Vítor and all his admiration to England; he subscribed to The Times and read it from cover to cover. His main companion was a dog, an English retriever called Dick. Timóteo was an early riser, a believer in cold baths, as well as an inveterate smoker of pipes and drinker of grog. He hated priests and said that any young man of twenty-five who had neither a wife nor a mistress was not to be trusted.

‘Who’s this Princess of Breppo, then?’ he asked irritably when Vítor came into the room; he was peering severely at the local paper through his horn-rimmed pince-nez.

‘Why? What do they say about her?’

Timóteo read:

“‘We have just returned from the Teatro da Trindade, where the benefit performance, etc. etc.” … here we are … “In one particular box was a very beautiful foreign lady, whom some declared to be the Princess of Breppo.”’

‘No, that’s what people were saying, but it wasn’t true. She’s a French lady, Madame de Molineux.”

‘These papers are nothing but gossip-sheets,’ complained Timóteo.

Vítor went over to the window, yawning. He had slept badly. He had left the Malta at two o’clock, and with his mind troubled and his belly still full of food, he had dreamed all night of Madame de Molineux, but mixing her with characters from Michelet’s History of the French Revolution, which he was reading at the time, and snatches of Tennyson’s poetry. He was in a street in the Bairro Alto, and someone was trying to introduce him to Madame de Molineux, but just as they were about to shake hands, something would push roughly past, separating them. First, it was Sir Galahad of the Round Table in his silver armour, a white feather in his helmet and a lily on his shield, who passed by saying: ‘I am strong because I am pure: I am searching for the Holy Grail and I destroy all shameful loves.’

Then it was a flock of very white sheep with fleecy backs, crushed together and bleating sadly, smelling of the meadow. And he and she stretched out their arms over the sheep, but their hands did not meet. Then, again, they were just about to embrace when a cart came trotting loudly down the narrow street; people were crowding round it, shouting, and, jolting about in the cart were three men, their heads held high; one was Camille Desmoulins, who kept crying out: ‘Lucile! Lucile!’; another was Danton, smiling proudly; and the third was his father, whom he knew only from the portrait in the dining room: a conventionally dressed man with a sepulchral look in his eyes and a lock of a woman’s dark hair clutched to his chest.

Vítor stretched, worn out by his dreams. A canary in a cage hanging in the window, started singing stridently.

‘Be quiet!’ bawled Timóteo.

The canary fell silent. And Timóteo, got to his feet, his wooden leg dragging on the floor.

‘Honestly, the poor creature has no millet and no water. Clorinda!’ he yelled.

A brisk, chubby woman appeared.

‘It’s eleven o’clock and these birds have had no fresh water and no food. Sort it out at once, Clorinda. And bring us some food.’

Going over to the table, leaning on his stick, with the newspaper still in his hand, he said:

‘So she wasn’t a princess, eh? As if she would be. What do they know!’ And he glanced at the paper again, shaking it. ‘This is supposed to be a newspaper. It’s got articles, reports, reviews: Special Tari? No.1 has been approved. A boarding school boy, Master someone-or-other, was dismissed from school. It seems that so-and-so wants to stand in Mirandela as a conservative. Someone else is auctioning off his pawnbroking business. A proposal put forward by the cattle-dealer Fernandes João was accepted by the council of Vila Nova de Famalicão, etc. etc. It’s extraordinary. Everything is there, including two columns listing ‘arrivals and departures’: he died for love … Idiots! And I haven’t had a copy of The Times for three whole days. Call this a country! Clorinda, surely those eggs have boiled by now!’

He had placed his stick between his knees, tied his napkin round his neck and was feeding toast to Dick, who was sitting beside him, staring longingly up at him, his tail beating against the floor. Then Uncle Timóteo, looking at Vítor, said:

‘What the devil’s up with you, man? You look positively yellow! What time did you get in last night? What time did you hear him come in, Clorinda?’

The excellent woman smiled and said:

‘He came in at two o’clock, sir, and then he sat up reading.’

‘He’ll ruin his health!’ exclaimed Uncle Timóteo, banging his knife on the edge of his plate. ‘You’ll be a hunched old man before your time! You’ll wear yourself out, man. By thirty-five, you’ll have crow’s feet, a hunchback, problems with your kidneys and you’ll just gaze at women from afar, having completely lost all interest.’

Vítor laughed: ‘I was reading about what your friends, the feudal lords, abbots and bishops used to do to the serfs before the revolution: beatings, torture, hangings, terrible.’

‘That was quite wrong,’ growled Timóteo. ‘The serf, the worker, is a man like us and deserves respect. Now, if they were Blacks or Indians …’

Vítor protested, scandalised. The Indians were a noble race!

‘Rubbish! Anyone who calls an Indian a man, has either never seen a man or never seen an Indian! I was there at the Goa rebellion, leading regiments … It’s odd, you know, I could have taken the whole of India with just two men each armed with a stick! Look at the English. A handful of police against millions of men. It’s a question of nutrition, my dear boy. What can people who live on watery rice do against hulking great soldiers who dine on roast beef? Why, bend the knee!’

Vítor had only very vague political beliefs. He hated the Spaniards crushing Cuba and the rebels in Managua, the Tsar whipping Poland into submission and the English punishing Ireland, that Celtic land of bards. He shrugged and said:

‘Tyrants!’

‘Tyrants!’ exclaimed Timóteo, his eyes flashing. ‘Do you know, sir,’ (whenever he got into any heated discussion about colonial politics with Vítor, he always addressed him as ‘sir’), ‘do you know what they’ve achieved in India? They created everything! Cities, railways, bridges, docks, navigable rivers, plantations. Before, when there was famine in India, they would die in their millions! And now they never lack for rice because the Englishman is there to give it to them.’

But Vítor considered the Indians to be more poetic than the English. He talked about idealism, about their architecture, their marvellous poetry.

‘Poetry? Rubbish! You should go and see the cotton business in Calcutta and Bombay! Now that’s real poetry! When all they had were their poems, they lived in the fields and went around naked. And now they’re well housed and well fed. When the English first went there, they found the people covered in lice, and the Indian louse, my boy, is a creature this size.’

He indicated the tip of his finger.

‘Uncle please!’ exclaimed Vítor, pushing his plate away with a grimace of disgust.

‘What’s wrong, man? Nothing in nature is disgusting. A man should be able to talk about anything and eat anything. I’ll tell you something. Between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-five, I breakfasted every morning on snake soup. Excellent stuff. For a whole year … when I had pleurisy.’

Vítor looked at him, fascinated:

‘You had pleurisy?’

Timóteo mumbled, looking down at his plate:

‘Yes, I did succumb … once … when I was in love.’

Vítor laughed out loud.

‘Even better! But who with, Uncle?’

‘Bring the coffee, Clorinda. And my tobacco.’ Then slowly removing his napkin, he went on: ‘When I say ‘in love’, I mean ‘infatuated’. It wasn’t love. I was over it in two months. But it was the one great romance of my life – I’ve had nothing more to do with romance since, not even in books.’

‘But who were you infatuated with, Uncle?’ asked Vítor, interested, his elbows on the table, a vague smile on his lips.

‘With your mother.’

Vítor was astonished. Timóteo dropped his last bit of meat into Dick’s eager mouth.

‘Your mother was fourteen then. But she was so tall and strong, and with such long, long, hair, she looked more like twenty-two. She was damnably beautiful! You wouldn’t know, since there’s no portrait of her. But, God, she was lovely. She lived next door.’ He smiled. ‘How time passes! She kept two blackbirds in a cage at her window. And there was a song we used to sing then:

A pretty blonde girl sits at her window

Tending her two little birds.

The moment I’d see her at the window, I’d start singing that song. I think that’s why she took against me.’

Clorinda came in with the coffee. Uncle Timóteo spent a long time stirring in his sugar and then lighting his pipe. Finally, he leaned back and said:

‘I’d get annoyed, she’d get annoyed, I started to fall in love with her and she couldn’t stand the sight of me. And that is when my infatuation began. She did everything she could to dissuade me. Slammed the window on me, turned her back, hid from me behind her sunshade. She was an insolent, cruel little devil! One night, I’ll never forget it, I had the ill-fated idea of serenading her in Spanish. There was a Spanish song that was popular at the time:

Señorita, usted que tiene

Amarilla la cola …

I stood underneath her window with my guitar, I used to play the guitar then, quite well actually, because one thing I’ve never lacked, thank God, is confidence … and I started strumming away and singing:

Señorita, usted que tiene

Amarilla la cola. …

The window opened and a little voice said: “Is that Senhor Timóteo?” You can imagine how I felt. I immediately started working out how I would climb up to her balcony. It was dark, in the middle of winter, and very cold. “Is that you, sir?” “Yes, my love, it’s me!” “Here you are, then!” And she emptied a bucket of dirty water over me. Can you believe it? “That’ll cool you off!” shouted the voice from above, the voice of that shame … of your mother, Joaquina.’

‘And did it cool you off, Uncle?’ asked Vítor, engrossed and surprised, his eyes fixed on the old man.

‘It certainly did, I caught pleurisy! I spent two months in bed getting over it. That’s where the snake soup came in. It was considered a sovereign remedy for tuberculosis in my day, and I think it still is in Trás-os-Montes. As soon as I recovered, I applied to go abroad and I embarked on the Santa Quitéria. The captain was from Tondela, a short, red-haired chap, but very brave. No sooner had we crossed the bar, than a storm hit us! I thought we were lost. The waves! I can see him now, in his oilskin hat, boots up to his knees, slithering about on the deck, shouting, and the waves pounding the boat. I was clinging on to one of the masts. He saw me and bawled out: “Get away from there, you pathetic devil!” After that, we were the best of friends. And within a month, I was cured and hauling in the jib with the best of them. I’d forgotten all about my infatuation. But that’s the way we were then. Not like men nowadays.’

‘And what happened then?’ asked Vítor.

‘Then? Nothing. After that, your father went to Coimbra, saw her, as I had, at the window, feeding her birds, and he sang her the same song. I don’t know if he tried serenading her too, but he didn’t get a bucket of water thrown over him, he got her father’s blessing instead, and they were married … and then you made your appearance in this vale of tears, a real vale of tears as it turns out …,’ he added solemnly, falling silent.

‘And my mother died a year later.’

Timóteo studied his pipe for a moment, then said slowly:

‘Yes, a year after you were born, she fell ill. She went to the Pyrenees with your father and … never came back.’

Then, after clearing his throat loudly, he got up, leaning on his stick, mumbling:

‘That’s the way things are in this hellhole of a world!’

The clock in the living room struck midday.

‘Oh no, I promised I’d be in the office by eleven!’ said Vítor. He got up and stretched. ‘Well, I’ve certainly learned a few things this morning. There’s so much I don’t know about our family.’

And after lighting another cigarette, he went out, adjusting the buckle at the back of his waistcoat, while Timóteo, slumped in his armchair, was muttering:

‘Yes, there’s a lot you don’t know.’

Timóteo stayed sadly smoking his pipe, glancing up now and then at the portrait in oils of Vítor’s father that hung on the wall. He had a long, pale face, a high, white forehead, long hair, a long, black moustache covering the corners of his mouth, and he was wearing a black satin cravat. It was painted in 1846 or 1847, years of great civil unrest in Portugal and the time of his unfortunate marriage. What a shock for Timóteo when he got the news in Angola that his brother Pedro had married Joaquina. ‘The fool!’ he had exclaimed, screwing up the letter and thumping the table. Timóteo had the greatest respect for his brother: he was so intelligent, so brave, such a gentleman. And he was going to marry Joaquina, Maria Silvéria’s daughter, to whom he, Timóteo, had said: ‘If you come to Oporto with me, I’ll set you up in a house and give you an allowance of two meias-moedas a month.’

It’s true she had thrown a bucket of water over him, but there were people in Guarda, Telmo Santeiro amongst them, who had seen a second lieutenant in the cavalry climb up to her window one snowy night. And his brother was marrying her! Stupid fool! Such a fine lad too; he had written that lovely short poem, Night in the Cemetery. And then, one morning, a year and a half later, when Timóteo was breakfasting on his usual beef stew, the black servant announced: ‘There’s a gentleman to see you, sir.’